Summer Fun!

Getting Older

About a week ago I had my 31st birthday. Yikes! I am in my thirties now. When you turn 30 you're just 30 and it's a big, fun, exciting age to be, but then you turn 31 and not so much. This birthday was so strange, it's not that I was depressed about it but it felt weird to be entering my 30s. When I turned 30 I was really excited, I had so much anticipation for the coming decade, I felt like the 30s were going to be MY decade, you know like the best years of my life so far. I had all these great intentions of working out and getting skinny and having an awesome year and then something happened. I'm not quite sure what it was- getting pregnant, maybe; a long, long, hard winter- definitely. And then I turned 31, not quite so exciting. I think it's probably just because I am tired of being pregnant and ready to get on with it, that and all the other stresses of daily life. I just don't feel like I'm mature enough to be this old, but hey they say 30 is the new 20 right, so I'm just going to try and live it up! I plan to live at least until I'm 90 so I've got plenty of life left to be lived!!!

My Two Front Teeth!

So Gracie has been wiggling her other front tooth for the past few days and yesterday she convinced Michelle to pull it out or maybe Michelle convinced her to let her do it... but anyway Michelle pulled it out and Gracie was very excited. Now all she wants for Christmas is her two front teeth...ha,ha! She is quite the opposite of me, she loves to have her teeth pulled! I still have vivid memories (or maybe they are nightmares) of Dad trying to convince me to let him pull out one of my teeth and I was crying hysterically and kicking and screaming and he and mom were pinning me down in the chair and I was fighting and Dad finally says "Eliza, what is the matter! Here is your tooth!" and I stopped crying and sat up and laughed because I didn't even feel a thing.

Lemonade Stand

Yesterday Owen decided he wanted to have a lemonade stand and he really wouldn't take no for an answer. So I finally relented after he went to Dan and Michelle's and had them make the lemonade for him. We got out a little table and Gracie made a poster, we had some paper cups and I had just made some chocolate chip cookies the night before and voila their stand was born. Michelle was their first customer but she only had to pay for the cookies, since she provided the lemonade :-) they were so excited to have a customer! I, the typical mom sat in the kitchen worried that nobody would buy anything and they would come in after an hour bummed out and sad. I needn't have worried however, since my little entreprenuers worked the traffic and the neighbors (Owen knocked on the next door neighbors and asked them to buy some) and they wound up making over $10! Reminds me of someone I used to know...

This one's for Granny!

Rex was so excited to get a present in the mail from his Granny and Papa! After his birthday he knew what opening presents was all about! He loves his new train (and so does Owen :-), or choo choo as he calls it. And the older kids LOVED their styrofoam! I should've taken a picture of our trampoline covered in it. And their light up bouncy balls ! :-)

Fourth of July Fun!!!

The Fourth of July in Rexburg is always a lot of fun, probably because it's a little cooler than in AZ and it's always fun to have that small town feel on holidays like this. I have always loved the 4th anyway, but we really have a good time when we are in Rexburg. We went to the parade in the morning, it was good, shorter than last year but some of the most fun things were missing this year. One of our past favorites was the car wash guys dancing with their mits to that carwash song but they weren't in it this year. But the kids did come home with plenty of candy that people throw out. Later, we went to Kris' parents for a bar-b-que and the kids were able to swim in their pool and test out their newly learned skills from swim lessons.

After the bbq we came home and had our little fireworks show complete with smoke bombs, snakes, sparklers, firecrackers, and of course our little fireworks. Not quite as good as the real ones you can get in Wyoming, like the ones Kris got a couple of years ago (we had a great show that year) but still tons of fun for the kids. Rex for some reason had this massive aversion to the whole thing, except for the snakes and the smoke bombs, and he spent most of the evening crying and standing next to the car in the carport. We were going to walk over to the fairgrounds when it got dark to watch the county fireworks show (we live really close to the fairgrounds) but they wound up starting the show about 20 minutes early, before it was even very dark so we just sat in the driveway and watched while we lit off the rest of our own. That last blurry picture is the view of the fireworks and some we were lighting off (you can tell it's not dark yet), I just wanted to show how close we were to the real thing. My favorite part of the whole day was after we came in from the fireworks and the kids had gotten on their pjs we were all just sitting around in the family room and I just started belting out "I'm Proud to Be an American". I was just being goofy mostly but then the kids started singing and they were talking about patriotic songs and Matthew went and got the hymnbook and looked up patriotic songs (he did this all on his own) and we all sang "The Star Spangled Banner" "America The Beautiful" and "My Country 'Tis of Thee" It was so much fun and made me feel so proud of my kids. We are so blessed to live in this country and we are so grateful for all the freedom we enjoy and we are so thankful to all those who fight to protect it. We are proud to be Americans!!!