Whale Watching in Juneau

Summer in Juneau is here, I guess!  I had heard May was the best month of summer, and from there it's pretty rainy and cloudy, which has turned out to pretty much be the truth.  But we've made the best of it in true Alaska fashion with lots of hiking and fishing!  We even did a bit of camping!  What yo don't see here, though, is that the tent was set up in our front yard.  The kids got a kick out of it, though!

We've been having fun exploring the different trails around here.  This one is called Salmon Creek, and it's a hike to an old electric building thingamajig then up to a reservoir.

We only got to the thingamajig, but we let the kids take off their shoes and play in the water.  You can probably tell by the looks on their faces, though, that they weren't too keen on the idea.  The water was coooold!

But it was a sunny day, and it sure was pleasant to just soak of the rays by the river!

Cady and Tony in the midst of a deep conversation over their watermelon, strawberry and grape bowls.

There are so many dandelions here!  The kids think that Juneau is the most beautiful place they've ever seen because of the abundance of yellow blossoms.  And these suckers are HUGE!

Of course that means tons of dandelion seeds to blow, which is always fun!

Randy when to his second year of scout camp this summer.  It was out on the beach, and boy was it beautiful!  As we were hiking in one evening, rays of sun were coming through the clouds, and I got to teach Tony what a sunbeam is, and whey Jesus wants us to be one!  Needless to say we sang that song a lot on the hike in.

Here's the beach while the tide was out.  Just beautiful!

My dad sent us up his old fishing poles, and our landlords gave us a bunch of their stuff, too.  So Papa and the kids have been doing a lot of fishing at the lake across the street.  They stock it with little rainbow trout, and they've been having lots of success in catching them!  What I love about the above-picture is that they're out there practicing casting in the pouring down rain!  Gotta love Juneau!

Tony was the first one to catch a fish!  Way to go, Tony!  He was very happy to bring it home and watch papa clean it.   He was not so happy to have to eat it.  

Last Day of School, Chickenpox, the Glacier, and Oreo Day

Tony's hairy like his Papa!

Cady showing off her ace bandage

Well, it's been quite an exciting weekend at the Naegle home! Thursday was the last day of school, and the kids couldn't be more excited! Cady being our little clutz of course fell down the stairs at school, and so she was proudly sporting her ace bandage. Apparently Scott remembers his mom shaving his head the last day of school every year, so he chose to pass this tradition on to the kids, and Tony and Randy got their heads shaved today. My favorite comment of the night was from Tony: "Mama! I've got lots of hair all over me! I look like Papa!" Haha! That's right. His father's a hairy monster, and now he is, too. On Friday night, I was checking on the kids after they went to bed, and Randy was complaining about not being able to go to bed because was so itchy. I suppressed my natural inclination to say "Whatever, go to sleep." and leave, and checked on him, and what did I find? A whole bunch of spots all over his back! Uh-oh! It couldn't be chicken pox! He's been vaccined! Apparently this doesn't matter, though, 'cause sure enough, the doctor confirmed he has chicken pox. Oh great. I remember chicken pox as being one of the worst sicknesses in my life with pox all over my body, including my mouth and down my throat. I called my boss to prepare her for me being gone for the next week at least as it cycles through the kids. Luckily, Cady started showing spots later on Saturday. This is one strange disease, though. Apparently since they've had the varicella vaccine, if they get the pox, it's a very watered down version of it. And you know what? It's true! There has been no fever, no body aches, and Randy only had spots on his torso and arms, and Cady only had on her arms. As for Tony, maybe he had it, and maybe it was just mosquito bites. I didn't really know.

I went to church on Sunday while Scott stayed home with the sickies, then came home after Sacrament meeting. The kids were still doing surprisingly well, so we decided to go for a little walk. We went out to the West Mendenhall Glacier, which is the path that you can take to go to the Glacier. We decided to walk just until we got tired.

The walk was absolutely beautiful! There were mountain streams and trees everywhere. 

We stopped to drink some water. This was a completely impromptu walk so of course we didn't have water bottles at home.  We did have an empty syrup bottle, though! Maybe it's about time to get a Nalgene or two?

About 1/2 hour into it, we got to the lake. Isn't it beautiful? So clear, and the weather by this time was beginning to clear up.

The kids pretending they like each other.

After the lake, things really started getting adventurous.   We hiked and climbed over the ridge of the mountain.

At the top, it was so wonderful to see where we had come from.

And very thrilling to think of where we were actually heading!  Oh yeah, by this time, we had decided that we were actually gonna try to get all the way to the glacier.

Now all we had to do was just keep on going.  Just one more climb.

After a scary passage across the glacial river (I wasn't even crazy enough to take pictures during it), we finally made it to the glacier!  We had tied up at the river, and we just kept right on into the ice cave.  Since this was a completely unplanned thing, we weren't too versed how safe everything was, but we did go inside a little to check it out.

The ice is the most beautiful blue you've ever seen!  It was very drippy, and all the melting made very cool shapes.

After having a quick snack in the shadow of the glacier, it was back up the mountain!  I'd like to say that since we'd been on the trail before, it was easier, but we actually got lost and wandered around the top of mountain for about an hour before finding the trail again.  In the end, though, it was so nice to have made such a rigorous hike (for us).  It really instilled in all of us a sense of accomplishment.  Especially while seeing all the helicopters flying over as tourists paid big money to fly out to the glacier, we were able to hike it to it for free and enjoy it so much more.

Today, though, we were  happy to have the second annual Oreo day.  We love it when our kids mispronounce things and we get to eat Oreos as a result.

The kids on Mendenhall Glacier

Almost to the Glacier! Hear what the kids have to say!

Our wall of scriptures

So, this past week - or month - has been really discouraging and disheartening in terms of being a parent. We really feel like the adoption (and therefore sealing) is quickly approaching, and Satan is trying his darndest to make it not happen. I don't know what it is, but the kids have just been especially unruly and argumentative and contentious, and many times lately I've found myself locked in my bedroom sobbing and and wondering what the @#*$ I was thinking taking on three kids at once. Well, we've put two and two together, and moving from defense to offense. We've really been slacking on the basics, namely scripture study, family prayer, and family home evening. No more! After a lot of hard work by my Cricut, I spoofed our wildly popular Hawaii countdown into our Book of Mormon countdown. Each cut-out in the picture represents one chapter of the Book of Mormon,]. After we read a chapter, one of the kids gets to take it down. The kids have LOVED taking down flowers for the Hawaii countdown, so I hope they're excited about this, too. Randy got to take the first one down today, and he was pretty excited. And with it right there in our dining room (good thing we rarely have visitors!), it will be a constant reminder for us to actually do it. Wish us luck! Day one, and we did FHE, scripture study, AND family prayer! Take that!

Parenthood

In the past day, I have had a traumatic (for me) time of motherhood while dealing with a child and his escalating dishonesty and theft. Many parents would say these are just parts of being a child, but I take these things so seriously because I know his background and the situation he was in for the first seven years of his life, and have seen what both sides of his genes have created, and it terrifies me. I know what his earliest role models were during those soooo important formative years, and when he starts walking down that path, it terrifies me, especially now that he's getting older and past the age of accountability. As we've been dealing with it, I've been so moved that this must be how Heavenly Father feels about us. He's given us all the tools to be good and is constantly telling us if we would just listen, and instead we bang out heads against the wall in ignorance (as in ignoring, not as in not knowing), and I just feel a renewed desire to be good and follow His commandments. I have always thought that parenthood is about growing good children, but it's also our next step in becoming more like Heavenly Father, isn't it? By having a similar, albiet much smaller, role as he has in being a father and mother. Now if I can understand and adopt the same parenting style as Him...

Summer's here! How do we know? Because the cruise ships are now in port! We're getting at least two cruise ships in port a day, and downtown is actually awake! That means that stores are open and there are fun little tourist-y things to do. The first Saturday the ships were in port was "Juneau Appreciation Day." If you actually live in Juneau and are not a tourist, you got discounts to a lot of the tourist things.
The big discounted thing was you got to ride the tram up Mt. Roberts for 75% off! It was great! Unfortunately, with it being so early in the season, there was still a LOT of snow up there, and all the trails were closed. We did take one of the closed paths (aren't we naughty?) and went up to one of the observation decks that overlooked the Gastineau Channel. It was a fun snow hike, but we weren't wearing the proper shoe attire. That translated into a lot of slipping and sliding. It was amazing that there was still so much snow up there! It was getting weaker, and there were times when I broke through and it was all the way up to my thigh.

Apparently May and June are the beautiful months in Juneau, and one July hits, it starts going downhill again. That means there are two or three sunny days a week! We're taking as much advantage of it as we can. We do a lot of hiking and looking for wildlife. Unfortunately we haven't run into anything spectacular but a couple of beavers, and we saw one porcupine coming down the tram from Mt. Roberts. Except Scott, of course. He was working a very late night shift at work, and came home at 2 am, and he said there was a HUGE bear in our driveway! Eeks! When he went into the driveway it was running away, but EEKS!!!
Above is Tony with his walking stick on one of our hikes. Tony is still absolutely obsessed with Pirates, but he has now found a new love: "Parkour!" He is fascinated with climbing and jumping and going to places in unusual ways. Sure, he's only four years old, but I see many broken bones in our future.
He the kids are at Mendenhall Lake, with Mendenhall Glacier in the background. This is one of our favorite places to go! It's so beautiful and majestic!