Pioneer Day 2011

We love Pioneer Day. Emily in particular just loves Pioneers & hearing stories about them and seeing how they lived. Each year we like to dress up and play pioneer games and have some activities to make us appreciate them & all they did so that our beliefs could flourish.

This year Pioneer Day (July 24th) fell on a Sunday. I figured we'd just do our Pioneer Games on the 23rd, until they scheduled our Worldwide Day of Service for that day. Soooo, we did it on Friday afternoon.

A few years ago Emily grew out of the little blue pioneer dress we have. I had her wear a skirt she had with a pioneer-y blouse the following year. Last year I said I'd make her a new dress but didn't get around to it & just quickly made her a long skirt & had her wear it with a blouse again .... promising to make it this year. As the day loomed closer I wsa feeling the absence of that new dress for Emily. Honestly, I was tempted to tell Emily, Jacob & Jane that I was too busy this year (with packing and moving & all the work of building the new house) to be able to pull it off, but that's the thing about traditions - it's well, tradition! They love it & I didn't want to break the fact that we do it every year. So at 10pm the night before I pulled out the ol' sewing machine to make Emily a dress. Don't look too closely at the pictures, she wore it un-hemmed (I'll get to hemming it later this week.)

We invited over a few friends and I split the kids into under 6's and big kids. It was super hot & humid so we did everything inside the house, with the exception of the hoop which the big kids started with on the back patio.

Those are authentic pioneer flip flops.

Jacob in his "coonskin" hat.

While they were doing that the little kids did the bean bag tossing game. Two cans are attached to a stick on opposite sides - there's a small bean bag & you have to toss it from one to the other by flipping the stick over while the beanbag is in the air. We copied it from a game we saw in Nauvoo and the kids love it. I really need to get Rick to make us another of these so we can have 2 going at once.

Then the big & little kids switched.

After those 2 games Emily read them a couple brief stories from pioneer children's journals

from "I Walked to Zion."

I had made 4 loaves of bread that morning before we went to swim team practice, so after the games and stories the kids shook cream in a jar to make butter.

They took it very seriously!

Then we enjoyed the butter on our thick slices of bread with cold milk. Probably just the snack pioneer children would have loved.

By then the taffy had cooled enough for us to pull it.

 I had left it bubbling on the stove when I ran out to set the little kids up with the hoop and had kind of forgotten about it for a few minutes. It got hotter than it should have by the time I remembered it. They could still pull it but once it had cooled it was more like hard candy than taffy. Oh well, they still liked eating it, I just told them not to try and bite it in case they broke their teeth!

Guess who still bit it?

Little Pioneer Children.

This is the last year Jane will fit this dress. Next year I'll have to make her a new one too. It has been such a great dress. I made it for Rebekah in 1997 for the 150th anniversary re-enactment of the pioneer trek. She and I met my mother, who had been gone for months walking from Winter Quarters and finished the last 5 days of the trek with her. Emily wore it and now Jane. That dress has seen some happy days for my 3 girlies.

I'm glad I pulled it together at the last minute because the kids had a great time and now it's still our tradition.