From Eaglete to Eagle in just 18 short years!

Stockton became the latest Smith boy to earn the rank of Eagle this week.  Congrats!!!  His project took over 150 hours and was delayed about 6 months because of our horrific winter weather.

We had snow from early October to early May, so trying to paint the outside of a building was a challenge.  Here is Stockton helping to power wash the old paint off.

We had two different work days (plus lots of extra days the family put in).

Working away.  You can see how awful it was to try to cover the decaying wood.

Our helpful crew.

When all was said and done, we accomplished quite a bit.  The Board of Review was held July 22, 2014.  Congrats to the newest Eagle Smith!!!

Stockton with his Eagle Board.

4th of July at Georgetown Lake

We went camping over the 4th of July and joined Jared's brother and his family up at Georgetown Lake.  I didn't get any photos of the kids behind the boat (tubing, boarding or trying to surf), but we had fun just the same.

Parker and Slade around the campfire.

Briggs fishing from the shore.

Jared, master fisherman on the pontoon.

Stockton taking the plunge off the dock.

Parker taking the plunge, also.

Parker just messing around on the pontoon.

Briggs actually fished from the pontoon.

Harley, enjoying retrieving sticks that we threw out into the water.

The end of the Boy of Summer

Brigham finished his last year playing baseball with style.  Here are some great shots to remember the fun he had playing his favorite sport!!

Nice snag at first base to get a runner out.

Putting the smackage on the ball.

Ready at 3rd base.

Pitching his last game.

Bringing it home.

Briggs had a great time playing baseball all these years.  If we had a baseball team at our school, he would definitely be on it.  Way to go, dude!!

8th Grade Graduation

Here are some shots from Parker's graduation.  They aren't great because I had to use Jared's phone, but at least the event is documented.

Walking into the event--a big tough 8th grader.

Along the "green carpet" the kids were allowed  to write a personal message.

Getting TONS of awards.

The actual diploma.

Heading out as a lowly freshman now.

On to high school.  Watch out!!!

Sluff Day for the 8th Grade Graduates

At our school they still do an 8th Grade graduation.  So the kids get a final field trip, which is basically just a day to mess around.  Here is Parker's last day of middle school.

The Yellowstone Art Museum
The educational part of the day.

His self-portrait

Bowling. . .not educational, but certainly entertaining!!!  Parker doing the backwards, granny technique.

Behind and under the leg technique.

An actual attempt to bowl correctly-lol!!!

Our LAST Science Fair, hooray!!!

Thankfully, this was the last year for Science Fair.  We have been doing it for 10 years straight and it is getting difficult to come up with new and interesting ideas.  Brigham's idea this year was to work with ice instead of fire, what a nice change.  However, we discovered fire is much faster than ice.  The experiment was to change the temperature of the ice with the metal wire through pressure.  So, this is the ingenious way that we "weighted" the wire.

 Then you need to let the wire do the work.  The difficult part about this experiment was temperature control.  Putting the experiment in the fridge or freezer didn't work, because then the wire was the same temperature of the ice.  Therefore, the results were kind of all over the board.  However, we did accomplish the goal of getting the wire to sink into the ice and then the ice re-formed over the wire completely encasing it in the ice cube.

Lewis & Clark Caverns Field Trip

Of course, no school year would be complete without the end-of-year field trips.  Brigham's class went to the Lewis and Clark Caverns between Bozeman and Butte.  I have always wanted to go there, but whenever we passed by, we were always in a hurry to get somewhere.  Here are a few great pictures of our day spent at the caverns.

Here is the whole class, they are a great group of kids.

Heading inside

The original opening to the caverns.  Look at that drop, yikes!

This is called the Beaver Slide.  You have to sit down and slide from one chamber to the next.  The color photos didn't work so great in the low light, and the black & white doesn't show the great colors you can see swirled into the rock from everyone sliding down.

Some awesome formations.

This is called bacon because of the color and also because it hangs off the wall in thin slabs just like bacon, yummy!

One of the tunnels the Civil Conservation Corps boys made by hand in the caverns to get from one camber to the next.

This is what it looks like with all the lights turned off.  You literally could not see your hand in front of your face, it was very disorienting!!

This is called caramel popcorn.  All these names made us hungry!

These steps were chiseled by hand and took about a week per step.  Here you can see the great colors.

All-in-all, we had a great time.  We even got to see some of the bats that live in the cave.