** * Our Life with 13 Kids * **: September 2025

Saturday, September 6, 2025

Sophi is 14

Happy Birthday to Sophi!

Sophi is 14 years old today! Lucky for her, I remembered to get candles at the store, so the cake properly represents her years.

She let Katharine blow out the candles with her, and then we all had chocolate cake and cookies and cream ice cream (and neapolitain and chocolate chip, cause my mom brought some over too). Three days ago I said that Abi is the child who's birth and entire life has been recorded on the blog. That is technically true, since I began this blog in 2007, but it really began in earnest after our trip to Costa Rica and Chile, and Sophia was born after we got home from that adventure and I continued with my weekly recording of events, so Sophi is really the one who has had her life most thoroughly documented since her birth. So in honor of 14 years, here are 14 posts to commemorate her life

I'll try to keep up with this tradition of sharing links, and maybe I'll even go back and add them to the various birthdays that the kids have already had this year, so that no one feels left out. But if I do that, for the record, the birthday links started with Abi and Sophi in 2025.

Today Owen and Peter had soccer games at the same time (9am) so I arranged last night for Peter to get a right with a neighbor, and I took Corey's car when I took Owen to his game. Abi was gone with the van taking the ACT, and Corey was at a crops garden assignment and rode his bike there for that. Owen played hard and looked like he'd been drenched in a rainstorm by the time it was over.

He definitely broke a sweat! He plays hard!

Corey and I just gave Sophi cash for her birthday, so there were no toys, but she made her own toys. She and Natalie have been playing legos in their room, which made me smile.

Sophi created an AMAZING castle for Jasmine! It looks really good, especially how she did the porch at a diagonal, and the way she made it look like it has Arabian carpets/rugs inside, it is very impressive.

These kids have years of legos under the belts. I'm kinda a beginner, and I don't know all the lego techniques and skills that the kids have acquired. I shall seek to have them teach me.

Hyrum arrived home from his internship in San Diego. He left this morning and drove all day. We are excited to have him here for a week before he heads back up to Idaho for school next Saturday. Abi's friends threw her a little surprise party tonight, but with Hyrum here to help watch kids, Corey and I went climbing. Lily came and bouldered and we did a bit of toprope. We just got back, the girls were watching a "K drama" (Korean romantic drama) and I asked where K was, they said she was upstairs. I found her asleep under the lego table. She's been playing hard!

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Quiet Place

Abi and I did a short hike tonight. I showed her my secret spot.

I had mentioned going on a walk around the block, and Abi wanted to join me for that, but then I got excited about having an interested companion and said we should do a short hike instead, and then she didn't want to go. I pressured her a little bit, and she said she would have felt guilty if she didn't come. It was short, and she did like it, but we agreed that next time time I'll give her atleast 24 hour notice. She doesn't like things being sprung on her when she's got different plans in her head of how her evening is going to go. I really like it though. It's just a quick walk there and it's a good quiet spot, and now Abi knows where to go if she needs to get away and be alone for a few minutes.

When we got back to the main trail, all of a sudden there were lots of groups of people going up or on their way back down. I joked to her under my breath "Ugh, people!"

Back at home, we just finished scriptures after tracking everyone down. Corey couldn't find Daniel and Peter. I said they were prob in our closet, and they were. That was where I had left them making the sleeping beauty dragon. They think it's pretty cool, and now Peter has a good "boy" thing to play with when he plays with Katharine. He is always excited to play with her after he gets home from school. He made his own version of Elsa's snow monster to go with our castle. He is very creative and a promising future lego master.

Wednesday evening when kids were going to bed, I went and got K from playing legos and sheepishly apologized to Sophi and Natalie for the state of their room. I thought of saying I'd fix it before they got home from school today, but I wasn't sure what expectations they would have if I said that (like if they want the legos gone from their room...) so then I told them that the room would look "better". I knew I could do that. I spent a bit of time organizing the legos, and then I moved in some small white bookshelves that had been in the laundry room. Now the bins are on the shelf instead of stacked on top of each other on the floor. I got it all picked up enough that I was able to vacuum their room. Sophi was pleased when she saw it, and didn't even seem to mind that legos were still in her room and that for the time being this is still going to be Katharine's play area. I had three bins of legos that needed to be sorted last night, and today I finished all of them. Sophi and Natalie both ended up joining Katharine in playing later. Maybe I might slowly bring up one bin from the basement at a time and see if we can get things sorted more. Just if I need to find more pieces from the basement to make the castles and stuff. I'm hoping Peter and I can do Ariel's castle this weekend.

(Aurora's castle has been destroyed and gone the way of all ~~the earth~~ legos, sniff.)

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Abi is 18!!

We have another adult in the house! Happy Birthday Abi!!

I bought cake and ice cream this morning, but I forgot candles, so we tried to fashion and "1" and "8" out of them, which didn't work, but I bet you wouldn't have even noticed had I not just pointed it out. The kids had friends over, who joined us for cake and ice cream (Peter with his arm around his friend Lucy, Owen's friend Liam didn't stand in for the pic). We had more than enough to share. For her birthday, Abi skipped Lyceum, and she didn't have to do any top rope for FHE on Monday. Corey really wanted her too, we were teasing her that in a year when she's gone she'll miss us, like Hyrum when we made him go skiing with us at Jackson Hole in Feb 2021: Hyrum "I hate this so much... I hate skiing. My ankles hurt so bad! I'm so excited to go on a mission and that Dad won't be able to make me go skiing next year..." So on Mon when I took Abi over to climb, and she begged and begged not to do it - she didn't have socks, she didn't want to climb without socks, but she didn't want to wear mine, she didn't want to "can I please not climb? For my birthday???" Well, if it gets us out of a gift... haha. So I really did want to climb, so I let her belay me and I was glad to do it. I did two overhang climbs, both 5.10c's and they were really good and challenging and I liked them, going to have Corey do those sometime. So that was one of her presents, but not really. I actually didn't give her a gift this year. For these older kids, we've changed to giving them cash, but now that Abi's an "adult" she gets what the college kids get, which is a lunch out with Mom and/or Dad. We didn't do that tonight cause she had YW (they went to the temple) so we'll do that on Friday. We maybe could have given her $50 as a farewell to childhood, but today she cashed in on her $1000 deal, so we didn't really feel inclined to give her another $50 bucks. Here's a pic of when Abi made her deal on Jan 10, 2018.

Abi had Corey pay up right away and so tonight she worked on ordering a $600 iphone with her loot. There were a few glitches on amazon, and it kept cancelling the order right after she placed it, so instead of trying a third time, we're going to wait until tomorrow and see if any charges when through, and we'll try again then.

I woke up early for a morning hike to Bell canyon to gather some creeping Oregon grapes that Corey and I discovered this past Monday.

It was fun, and also a bit harder to gather than I thought, which caused me to question if it would be a good activity for FHE or not. I think they'll be freaked out by bugs and spider webs and poky leaves. So we might change that, we'll see. I'll get Hyrum's input on what he wants to do. It's our one FHE with him before he goes up to BYU Idaho. He will be here Saturday yay. So today Corey took jr high carpool, and we planned for us to not do workouts and instead he could bring home the high school kids at 2:30, and then he and I would go climb after they got home, which we did. The red 5.11b that I can do was gone, being changed with new routes. Corey said "Good! I'm tired of doing that one!" I'm glad I finally sent it last week.

Well, as one last tribute to the end of Abi's childhood, here is a link to pics of baby Abi in 2007. She was the first baby we had after I started this blog, so she's been almost documented her whole life, although I was not too diligent the first three years. It was during our trip to Costa Rica that I started to write 5x a week. Let's see, I'm going to find 18 posts to celebrate 18 years of Abi - let's see what comes up when I search her name on the blog...

Ok! Well yeah, there's a good but not an exhaustive list of a few moments of Abi's wonderful 18 years of life! We love you Abi!

Monday, September 1, 2025

Hike Legos Climb

Hello. I'm up past my bedtime cause I'm waiting for the wash to be done. I need to put our biking clothes in the dryer before I go to bed cause Corey and I are going to go on a bike ride in the morning (maybe Big Mountain!) This morning we went on a HIKE together! Which I loved. Very nice to go slow and chill and have time to think and talk as you walk together. It was really nice. I first took him to my secret spot. Then to the trail to walk around the reservoir and then we kept exploring so I could show him places Mel and I went - the little tide pool area and the giants boulder playground.

Oh, and my other rock too. This time something new happened - I discovered berries! I thought they looked good enough to eat, so I picked a sprig and then googled a photo of them as we walked back to the car. And lucky me, the internet said the were edible, so I risked it, and ate them. They were sour but I liked them, and I am going to go forage for more berries later this week. We also talked about next week doing a FHE hike up there (Hyrum will be home and he suggested a hike) and we can bring vanilla ice cream and have berries and ice cream up in the mountains! That would be memorable, huh? I think they have to have powerful good stuff in them from how brightly they stained my hands (I broke

one when I picked them. When I come harvest later I'll bring kitchen shears). After coming home, Natalie made apple muffins, I thought she looked cute in her apron.

On this day off from school, most of us continued playing legos, which I've temporarily or maybe permanently moved into Sophi and Natalie's bedroom. (Not all of them, just girl "friends" legos.) The legos are not very organized yet, and it's actually been a big mess the past two days, but that's ok cause Sophi and Natalie were gone Friday night and most of Saturday. They have been very patient with me and my mess. Peter and I worked on a slightly modified version of this Elsa's castle almost all day yesterday. Our version is the castle here on the left side of the table. Wow! We did a good job, huh Peter!!

He worked with as much focus as he had building the sand castle at Bear Lake. We had to do some building improvisations, but we did it and it looks so good! When Corey called us down for scriptures last night, we only had to put the snowflake on top, but we couldn't find the right piece to set it in, so we called back "Coming! ...we're coming!" but we weren't cause we had to find the piece! We didn't find it, but got another piece that would do and figured I'd fix it today. We brought down and presented the castle before this house of Lego masters. They said it was good! After scriptures, I went up and tried to clean up a bit and get legos off the floor in their room, but then Natalie and Sophi started making the mess! Sophi must have been inspired cause last night she began to remake Ariel's Underwater Palace 43207. She worked on it today and soon everyone was in and there was no room for me!

I'll be able to play with Katharine later this week, and maybe Ariel's castle will be done by then. The little boys have school tomorrow but ALSN have another day off tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get a system worked out and organized and that won't make anyone too unhappy. I'm weighing options like maybe trying legos in the music room? where my L desk is? Maybe I give them the L desk as their table to create on? I don't know where I'd move the books in here though. Hmm. Maybe I will keep things in Soph and Natalie's room, or my room over in the nook maybe? I'll continue to think about it. Anyway, Katharine played with it today and Natalie helped us find all the friend minifigures with the correct faces, dresses etc. Last night Natalie started working on the Lego Story books again, trying to fix them all.

So that's what me and most of the kids did today. Not Abi though, she was on a hike - she got up at 5:30 am to Willow Lake with friends, good job Abi! Corey spent a good amount of time today figuring out ski passes and rentals. He was able to get us a few tickets this year cause it's our last winter with Abi. All the kids at home plus Corey and I all got 4 days up at Park City via a sale that ended today. We also got 2 days for Wes after he comes home in January (SO EXCITED!!!!) and Hyrum and Mel & Christian might be getting some too. The marrieds with kids (JEM, aka Joseph Eliza Mary and EBA, aka Ethan Bella Alvie) are out this season. So good job Corey for working his magic and making that happen somehow. I got kids' heights and weight, and after having kids try on boots, he took a few down to ski-n-see to rent a few things we were missing. After that was done, he called and said we could do FHE now - climbing at Millcreek with his dad. Wayne met us there, brushed up on his belaying skills, and then we belayed kids for a bit, using all our guess passes on the 1st day of the month.

It was really great to be there with Wayne, and will be something that I'm sure kids will remember!

I belayed Natalie for 3 climbs, then Peter for a few. Katharine was super cute with her cute little climbing shoes again. And Katharine ran up to me and said in her adorable little voice as she motioned with her arms "I did all the way up all by myself! ...in the kids area!" Then she was swinging on the rope, which was cute, but then the staff came to let us know that is not allowed. Lily and Sophi bouldered most of the time.

Then Sophi did one toprope with Corey belaying her. But her arms were so sore because of wake boarding at Scofield on Saturday. Corey reassured her "You don't have to explain yourself! You're fine! I got all day. Belaying isn't wearing me out" and then he also teased her "This is the Sophi I used to know! Tough athlete, into sports, tom boy..." and not the girl into jewelry, fashion and fingernails that she seems to be at school. Then at 5:30, the kids all went to Wayne's house for a movie and pizza. Papa Murphey's thank you Wayne! Corey and I climbed for 30 minutes until it closed early bc of labor day at 6pm. I did three climbs with Abi belaying me earlier, cause she really really didn't want to, and then Corey and I did 3 together, so I got 6, not bad. Then we went and joined them at Wayne's. Katharine eating pizza.

It was a good FHE and a fun day full of recreating.