Our Town

Yesterday, The Gale Academy of Classical Education drove about town taking pictures for a project we call "Farewell to Camas". Actually, I call it that. The boys call it: "Anything to Get Out of Regular School Work".

We began where it all started for our family: at the trailer park where we lived right after Andy graduated from BYU. His first job was at Tektronix and we found a used single-wide trailer for an affordable price and moved it into this place. Scott was just a baby and this is where he learned to walk and talk. We have pictures of him inside the actual trailer when he was an actual baby but those are packed away in long-term storage. It was in our little trailer where Scott learned the names and sounds of all the farm animals. His favorite game was to have Andy tell him, "Scott, where's the horse?" Scott would run into his room and bring back the horse from his Fisher-Price farm. Then we'd ask him, "What does the horse say?" (this was in the days before every toy did all the work for kids--they could actually use their own imaginations and make the sounds themselves!). He would make the neighing sound and then wait for the next animal. He also spent many hours here with a magnetic alphabet board that he got for his 1st Birthday. He would point to a letter and say, "What's this?" and I would tell him the letter and the sound. He would go through the whole alphabet and then start over. Since we didn't have TV, this was as exciting as it got. But along the way, he learned to spell his name and other simple words.

This is also where we lived when Siara was born. When she started crawling she was a speed racer and could dash from one end of the trailer to the other in record time. Usually with Scott running after her and both of them laughing. I started doing daycare here so the trailer got a little crowded some days. I made a Noah's ark out of a grocery bag and traced the animals from the nursery manual. I mounted them on cardboard and Scott, Siara and the daycare kids played with that happily for hours.

When we found out Shanna was on the way, we decided it was time to find a bigger place. That will be a later post. Stay tuned for another episode of "Farewell to Camas".