Hart Happenings

  Happy Super Bowl Sunday to my family who totally doesn't care! It seems like such a lot happened in the last week!  Time flies.
  The boys were really excited to start their Compass classes again.  The Poetry Tea Time hour I was mentoring went really well (much to my relief) and it was fun to meet some new families and renew old acquaintances.  It is a really great group.
  The biggest news of the week is that Alex at long last sold the big business he has been working on selling for the last 3 years.  It was a long time coming and caused much rejoicing in the Hart household.  Alex learned a whole bunch and it excited to move on with that experience and gained knowledge under his belt.
  Tuesday I took Jack and Peter on a field trip to the Shoshone-Bannock museum down on the local Indian reservation.  It was fascinating!  The boys really loved the full-sized buffalo they had on display as well as learning how the tribe fished and the bead art they did.  They had a big bin of polished rocks there and the boys were excited to dig into those and found a couple to bring home with them.
  Wednesday was Eliza's birthday and we celebrated by having our Geography class!  I actually had a blast with eh giant South American map we taped out on the floor in the living room (the boys convinced me to leave it up for the rest of the week) and the kids had to run and stand on the countries I mentioned when we talked about the history of the continent.  Then we got to have a delicious Bolivian dish called Pique a lo Macho for lunch, along with some Brazilian lemonade (confusingly made with limes, not lemons), and hot dogs per the birthday girl's request.  I thought it was a fun day, despite the fact that Garrett and Addy were a little under the weather.  I will let Ruth give further details, but we appreciated being invited to join in the festivities of the day and it was great to have Mom and Dad join us as well!
  Alex's parents returned from Thailand, not really thrilled to be leaving the 90 degree temps for the frigid ones of Idaho in February, but they were glad to be back in their own home, I think.  Alex bough them a lovely new entertainment stand for their TV and it looks really nice.  They brought the boys some weird, squishy toys that they boys LOVED and also one of those big styrofoam airplanes. This one lights up and we have had a good time taking it to the church gym to fly it around in the dark.
  Ian got a break from his play practice on Friday and it was so fun to have him home.  His brothers monopolized his attention the whole day and he was a really good sport about it.  He and Alex attended a Vocal Point concert that night which they reported was exceptional.  Meanwhile the younger boys and I re-viewed the movie How to Train Your Dragon and recalled that it is one of the best animated films ever made.
  The weekend was eaten up running errands, budget sessions, flag football in the church gym, and Jack's soccer game.  He scored two goals and assisted another and we all cheered like crazy!  It was a really fun game.
  Dad and I had a really great conversation when he was up last weekend for the Banff Film Festival that centered around Adam Miller's juicy little booklet entitled: Letters to a Young Mormon.  If you would like to have your mind woken up to basic gospel concepts in a new way I can't recommend this book enough.  I've been re-reading it since Dad brought it back to me and it is so good!  I started underlining the especially thought provoking sentences and realized that I should've actually underlined the ones that weren't quite as scintillating because I've now basically underlined the majority of each chapter.
  I think, as I look around, that the boys have dumped out every Lego we own.  Jack has built a helicopter with a motorized propeller on it, Ian has created the coolest cruise ship ever called Treehouse of the Seas, and Peter has created a wall of Lego man heads.  All very unique and creative and messy.
  And so it goes........