Wide World....of Sports & Cirque



Zachary has been now for the second year on a city soccer league team (comprised of many of his FLEC school mates), and this year again they went to Disney's Wide World of Sports for the President's Weekend tournament.  Last year, they only won 1 game out of 3, but this year they have really come together as a team and are starting to show a lot of promise.  This year they actually made it to the play-offs and got a bronze medal!  We were so proud of them!  This tournament has teams that come from all over the country, and many of these are full-time soccer academy teams in which they are being coached for hours each day, so to have our team do as well as they did was super exciting!

Super exciting to go up and get their medals!



This is the coach Billy, along with a few other kids from the team

Zach and Cristian

Love the prayer time before with the sun streaming through the picture!

Also back in the same timeframe, Amy took the day off and went on a field trip with Kaleb to St. Augustine.  She has not done the tour of the fort etc ever before, so it was a really fun day for the two of us.  The weather was lovely all day, and we went several places while we were there, so it was fun to see a cross-section of history and interesting facts. 

Some of his classmates

A white peacock!

Very interesting black history museum

The whole class on top of the fort - beautiful views!

Both Kaleb and Zachary recently went through the educational class at church in which they learned about the gospel message.  Both boys have decided that they would like to get baptized, so we are trying to figure out timing.  Both of them want to have a more private baptism with friends and family, so we are coming up with options.

There was a reception at the end for all of the kids in the class

And parents could get up and share a message to the kids - our boys do not like to be upfront much, so they were a little shy about it!  Good thing Amy is used to speaking up front a lot, although she was a little emotional as well with the topic! :)

The Zs adore Cirque du Soleil so whenever one comes to town we are sure to go!  Luzia came to town this spring, so we all headed out - they had some really neat things that we'd never seen before, such as pictures created with falling water (by timing the water drops, they create a picture).  It was AMAZING.  And they had some cool soccer ball tricks that they were doing which of course was especially interesting to our family with how much soccer is played! :)

The soccer ball people

Pictures in the water

Another picture in the water

Random pictures:

Sweet moment with Devin and Addi out on the water - so good little friends!

Love the fact that as Zach and Addi both leaned against Amy to take a snooze on the boat that Zach was holding Addison's hand! Melt a mom's heart!

Addison is the pink one in the middle of the picture at gymnastics

We are doing allergy shots with the male Zs as they have a lot of headaches and allergies, so Kaleb was tested to see what he was allergic to - dust mites, some trees, cats

The Senechals Come to Visit!

At the end of March, we had the awesome FUN of having Amy's cousin Kim and her family come down to visit for almost 2 weeks.  They ended up staying with us the whole time, which meant that we got some quality visiting in!  Her boys, Nik & Lucas are each just one year younger than our boys, so the age spacing was perfect.  After an initial "warm-up" period (in wise Daddy's words - get the boys doing something and the ice will quickly melt.....), the boys formed a fast bond for the rest of their time.  Lots of fun memories were made!

Kim and Amy

We got new tubes this season, so all five of them could be behind the boat at the same time!

Even Niesha, Jeff and Sadie came out to play on the water for a little while!

Jeff's back was hurting, so he got a little PT from Kim!

The whole gang!

 While they were here, we celebrated Lucas' birthday, and went to go-cart for a while.

Jeff is Kim's cousin as well on the Babiuk side, so he was able to come over a few times to visit which was fun to catch up

 On the last Sabbath that they were here, we went out to the beach for a bit. The weather was absolutely perfect - not too hot and not too cold.  The water on the other hand was a bit chilly for the Floridians, but the Canadians loved it! :)

She did not last long in the water!

 The fun of the day ended up being Spike Ball, with all of us getting into the action with this.  Very portable and very fun!

The water is not so cold if you just dig a little pool for yourself and let the sun warm it up!

During this same time, we have the fun of our dear friends daughter Leah come down for the academy music festival. It was so great to see her!  Come again soon!

And to close up this week's post - our children have grown up as siblings to the Bs kids as they have been with them every day of their life until school began.  Addison and London are no different, and treat each other like sisters.  They are just so precious!

 This picture takes a little orientation - they are in a tunnel that had two holes where they could lay in the tunnel with their feet sticking out through the holes - so apparently they were laying in there chatting while Jennifer snapped this picture!  So cute - love those little feetsies sticking out!

Deer Valley 2019

We finally have come up with a workaround to try and get our pictures off of our phones - what a hassle it has been, and now we have thousands of pictures!

We flew out after sundown on Saturday night, and as we drove down to the airport we received notification that our flight had been delayed by an hour....not knowing exactly how long the delay would be we went over to Cracker Barrel to kill some time.  The delay ended up being over 2 hours.....meaning we got a VERY late into Utah.  Painful.

But while it was painful late night, we had LOTS of snow in Utah so we were excited to get up and out the door in the morning.  In a painful parallel experience to last year, the drive up to Brighton was SUPER slow - why???  Because there was a MOOSE on the road walking in front of the snow plow at about 2 miles per hour! :)  We did manage to get there though in time to get the kids into lessons thanks to Kelli pre-registering and paying for them (thank goodness for amazing friends!) 

Kelli, Amanda, Amy and Heather

What a beautiful day!

Later we caught up with William, Karis and Zachary in the afternoon after Zachary finished his half day lesson

The group now with Karis in it - Kent is leaning over back by William but you can hardly see him as he blends in except for his white goggles!

The whole Z family!

Kaleb is getting to be a very good skier!

 This year by far was the most snow that we have ever had - it snowed buckets 2-3 days - making the visibility hard a few days.

Is snowing cats and dogs a true phrase? :)

Zachary has a tradition that he always skis down Big Stick for his last run of the week, so Kaleb and Amy accompanied him this year - it was very snowy so Addison decided to pass on it this year although she made it down last year like a champ!

We shared a condo with Js and Cs this year, so the kids all had a blast playing together!  Addison brought her gel coloring pens and adult coloring book, so all the kids would huddle around coloring!

Mommy and me picture!  Amy got ear phones this year so that she didn't have to keep taking her phone out of her pocket with each text - it worked like a charm!

Addison was in ski school - she was leading the pack in this picture (she is the one with the pink pants in the front of the line - a bit hard to see her as Amy trailed her down the mountain!)

At the end of our vacation, we always love to sit around watching the bloopers on the go-pros from the videos that were taken - this time was no different - we all crammed into the living room and enjoyed watching the accomplishments!