Camp Kiesel

I'm not gonna lie. I have not being excited about Darren starting scouts. Not at all. The scout program is great, don't get me wrong, but for Darren it means A LOT of "stretching". Everything that Darren dislikes or is afraid of they do in scouts. For some kids these activities come easy and natural, not for Darren, but are hoping it will be able to find something he likes to do. He will work mainly on those social skills that are so difficult for him and hopefully he'll learn new things in the process.

Flipping through the cub scout handbook made me cringe and shake my head. We really don't have a ton of expectations but at least we want him to try it and be positive about it. Their motto is "Do your best" and that's a very important idea we would like Darren to learn and apply in his life and I'll be the happiest person on earth if that's the only thing he gets out of this. For us tough, the most important thing is that he experiments and tries new things and feels proud of himself when he's done.

I do get anxious about other kids picking on Darren because of his lack of skills on some things but  we hope he also learns that, in the words of Temple Grandin, he's different but not less.

So anyway, Darren's first activity was their day camp at Camp Kiesel and I gotta say Darren was all excited about it even though he had no clue what to expect. Daniel took the day off and went along. They met early in the morning around 7am and came back home around 1 or 2 pm. That's a L-O-N-G morning for a kid who loves to be indoors playing video games or on the computer.

They had a lot of fun activities planned for the kids like a nature walk, archery, boating, BB guns, leather crafts and an obstacle course. Overall and considering the situation Darren did great and much better than we thought. He was fine letting other kids ride in the car with him and Daniel, absolutely loved archery and the rope bridge. Towards the end he was tired and had a hard time with the bb guns (let's say he won't trying those any time soon) and even though he likes boating he did not appreciate getting splashed by other kids haha.

His den is taking the rest of Summer off (and I'm very happy about that :P) They will resume activities on September. There was only a pack meeting a couple of weeks ago and involved swimming and hot dogs. Needless to say Darren loved it! (and this time he didn't mind kids splashing and throwing balls in the water!!)

Power Tools

Daniel and Darren have been working on a wood project together. Daniel wanted to show Darren how to use some basic tools so they decided to make a little bench/table for him.
It's still a work in progress and so far they have completed the table and I helped him sand it so now it's ready to be painted/stained. I'll post more pictures once it's finished. In the mean time, here's the boys working on it.

Maybe I'll even get ambitious and have them make some simple shelves to display Darren's Legos since we're kind of running out of space in his room ;)

Donut Falls

We are not very "outdoorsy" people (and in Utah you'd be considered weird) but we do like to hike and take Darren for nature walks. He loves it too. On July 4th we decided to hike the popular, family friendly Donut Falls trail in Big Cottonwood Canyon. The drive up the canyon is beautiful and the weather was perfect. This was a rather short hike and very easy for little kids. The harder part was once we got to the falls crossing the log bridge and climbing the slippery rocks to get to the top. I thought for sure Darren would not want to go all the way up there but, lo and behold, he was more than ready to do the climb.... So there we went all the way helping the monkey reach his goal and I'm glad we did because we were able to see the the "donut" formation up close and the cave right below it where the water cascades down.
I'm so proud of Darren for being so brave, not ever did he want to turn around and leave even when he looked a little scared. We made it to the top and back down without a problem.
And just as I was thinking of how awesome it is that some of the best things in life are free we approached our car, which we left parked on the side of the road, and we saw the lovely parking ticket that a nice police man left for us as a souvenir. I can't believe we missed all 20 or so "DO NOT PARK" signs along the road!! I guess we had been warned, uh duh!

Yes, we climbed all the way up there

I looked out the window and what did I see?

No, not popcorn popping here but I love to see our winged "visitors" that come everyday to feed. Kelly, my neighbor and friend got me this cute bird feeder a couple of years ago for my birthday and I have loved it!!

We always have a ton of birds (all day long) and I find it so hard to get a good picture of them. This particular morning we had more than usual so I spent a lot of time trying to get a picture...

Darren was not that impressed, he worries about them pooping all over the deck, they can also be quite messy when they eat...but I love them and they make me happy :)

TWEET!