How Was Your Trip? (Part 3)

Goodbye, Pacific Northwest.  Hello, Idaho.
On our way back to Utah, we stayed a couple days with friends in Idaho.  These were friends we knew before either of us couples got married.  When they got married, they moved into the same apartment complex as us at BYU.  Our firstborn children are only a few months apart, so they just had to be friends.  These are those lifelong friends that you never lose and you visit each other from time to time.
While visiting them, we went to a playground and splash pad and met up with yet another friend from that BYU quad (apartment complex with four buildings surrounding a central grassy area) and her kids.  The kids again had so much fun playing together.

The kids ate lunch together then we all went back to the first friend's house.  More fun.  After the second friend and kids went home, we had some relaxing time and watched a movie.

That evening, we went to their local library for trivia night.  The librarians had set up a trivia game for adults to play.  The four of us played taking turns watching kids.  We substituted a person each round.  The kids had fun playing in the library and had fun afterward at the park across the street.

Once we left Idaho, we stopped at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and let the kids earn Junior Ranger patches.  They got to check out backpacks with gear in them to help the kids do activities to fill out worksheets.  When they finished, they got certificates.  We showed those certificates at the gift shop and got to buy patches for them.

So for those of you who ever want to do that, know you have to buy the patches.  They were only $2 each, though, and we'd been wanting to let the kids do that for some time.  But the certificates are free with doing the activities.  And the activities take some time.  So plan a lot of time.

We made it back late to our overheated home.  Nichole fell asleep on the couch and I went out to take pictures of the moon.
It was a wonderful vacation and hooray!  I finally blogged about it.  So for those that wonder, "How was your trip?" there you go.  It was an adventure.  It had laughter, tears, sickness, injury, birds, fun, family, friends, waterfalls, the ocean, birthdays, celebrations, resting, Duck Tales, and a whole lot of awesomeness.  Ta-Da.

KAT's Kreation

Jr. has a pair of pants that he really likes but he tends to get holes in the knee.  Then he tends to stick his fingers in the holes and make them worse.  I've tried to just stitch them up but that only lasts so long before the holes come back and he's sticking his fingers in them again.  Finally I was looking at a friend's blog one day and saw that she put patches on her sons' pants when they wore out the knees.  I'd never really done that before, but figured I could try it.
Jr. calls this particular pair of pants his "Batman pants" since he got them with some other Batman-themed items one time.  So of course I needed to put a Batman-themed patch on them.  I couldn't find any fabric I liked at the store (we have plenty of scrap fabric at home) so I finally decided I could be creative... with Jeremy's help.
He drew out the shape I wanted on black fabric.  I cut it out along with a yellow oval and a black oval to cover the hole on the inside of the pants.
Then it was simply applying iron-on adhesive to stick the black symbol and yellow oval together.  I stitched around the outside of the black symbol so it wouldn't fray.  I applied the yellow oval and the black oval to either side of the hole with the iron-on adhesive and again stitched around their edges to keep them from fraying.

Something I learned:  Next time I need to make sure the fabric on the outside and the fabric on the inside match up better.  After stitching up the outside oval I realized that if I poked the needle through from the back to the front, I would have these random stitches in the middle of my yellow.  I was able to adapt and managed to get the needle through so it didn't go all the way through the yellow part, but just the pants part.  And it didn't have to look as pretty on the inside, just keep the inside patch from coming off (I wasn't using the heavy duty iron-on adhesive), so I only had to make a few stitches here and there.
It turned out and Jr. was happy with the result.

 

Now my little boy can keep being a little boy and hard on the knees of his pants.