Random Summer Pictures

Here's a few more things to blog about - then I think I'll be all caught up!

• One Sunday morning, I was getting ready for church when I heard a blood-curdling scream.  You know, the kind when you can tell something is really wrong.  Sure enough, Josh came running into my bathroom with blood dripping out of his mouth.  Luckily, it was only a couple of missing teeth - ones that were slightly loose to begin with.  I guess he and Nicole were playing tug-of-war with a blanket.  Josh was holding on with his mouth.  He lost!  He was pretty traumatized for a while, but after a pep talk from Nicole about tooth fairies, and bragging rights, and sipping through a straw without opening your mouth, he was pretty excited to show everyone his missing teeth.

A few minutes later, we loaded everyone into the van for church.  It wasn't until we got there that I noticed Bronson had no shoes and Quinton was barefoot.  So I went home to get those things taken care of.   After sneaking in late, I looked down and noticed that my skirt was inside-out.  I didn't even bother to fix it.   What a day!

• Another benefit of Tech-Free Tuesdays is that they give us the opportunity to play with toys that we would NEVER pull out of storage otherwise.  The person who invented Zhu Zhu Pets should be incarcerated for making mothers spend HOURS snapping entire intricate little cities together only to find that their children have lost interest and moved on to another game.  Seriously - we only pull them out annually.  But when we do, the kids have enough fun that I decide not to burn them in protest.  Actually, Nicole has finally gotten big enough to put the city together by herself, so I didn't have to help this time!  Hip Hip Hooray!!!!

• One day, a good friend from Rexburg, Christine Arnold called.  She and her children were vacationing at a condo in Wolf Creek and she wanted to get together.  So we headed up the Ogden canyon and met them at a park in Huntsville.  It was fun to see the older kids pick up where they left off and play together.  The younger ones didn't remember each other, so they kind of stayed away from each other.  Christine and I have both had babies recently so it was fun to meet them, too!

L-R: Ila, Nicole, Kya, Alison.

It was the second time this summer that I was amazed by how much my friends' children have grown up in two years!  This is Jessa and Gage.  They seemed like babies when we moved, but they're all grown up now!

Chris, Quinn and I supervising.  Chris is a great friend, good woman, and wonderful example.  She's so easy to be with and talk to!  I'm glad we had the chance to visit and reconnect.  Thank heaven for good friends!

• I just had to throw in a cute picture of a sleeping baby.  

• David took the two older boys to our stake's father and sons outing.  They had a blast!  This little grove of trees was what the boys referred to as their "forest home."  They spent a lot of time playing in it.

A cute picture of them exploring.

I guess they didn't light a fire, so they ate their S'mores raw.  Silly boys.

They went for a hike in the morning.

Oh I love this picture of Bronson.  It's totally going to end up on my wall some day.

Sweet Bronson found a rock on his hike and decided that he just HAD to bring it home as a present for Mom.  David told him that he'd have to carry it all by himself.  So he lugged this huge thing around for a long time to bring me a gift.  Josh decided that he wanted to bring me an even bigger gift, so he found a big rock and dragged it home to me too.  Now I have two new rocks in my flower bed.

• Grandma and Grandpa Gee came for a quick visit.  They stopped by on Friday night (when the boys were at father and sons), but only stayed a short while.  Then, they went to a wedding reception and to visit Jodi.  On Saturday, they had another wedding to attend.  On their way home on Sunday, they came and ate lunch with us.  

We had a great time!  We sure do miss Grandma and Grandpa Gee.  We're glad they're serving this mission, but we're also looking forward to November when they get released so we can see them more often.

• We went to the Davis County Fair last week.  Grandma and Grandpa Smith met us there.  In this picture, Grandpa Smith is riding the elephant, Bronson is down at the bottom with the cotton candy, Alison is a bear, and Nicole is the cowgirl.

I love to enter stuff in fairs, but this year, I didn't grow anything to enter.  I forgot to make any baked goods until it was too late.  The only thing a COULD enter was the one thing I grew this year - a BABY!  So we entered little Quinton in the baby contest.  He was adorable and HUGE (like one of those giant pumpkins you see in fairs) but somehow, he didn't win.  Oh well - we all had fun watching him and we still think he's the cutest baby in the world.  It must have been rigged :)

Fair rides are ridiculously expensive, so I only let the kids go on one.  They chose this beast!

It swings you up in this circle.  It goes pretty fast!  Then, it stops and goes backwards.  The fair wasn't very busy on the morning when we went, so the ride operator let them go twice.  I watched as Josh's face changed from excitement to motion sickness.  I was just praying he'd get off before he started vomiting at high speeds.

He got off the ride (no vomit incident, thankfully), walked to the nearest booth, and collapsed face-first in the grass in the little patch of shade.  Poor kid.  He felt better pretty quickly once he was on solid ground.

The girls went shopping with Grandma Smith, but the boys and I went to see the animals.  This goat reminded us a little bit of our old goat, Licorice.  

And here's an awesome, huge pig.  Gotta love fairs!  If we were still in Rexburg, our kids would probably be entering pigs and/or goats that they'd raised.  As it is, Bron doesn't even remember our animals and Josh only vaguely remembers that one goat always butted him, so the farm animals are a real novelty to them

More Tech-Free Tuesday Pictures

You thought I'd given up on Tech-Free Tuesday, didn't you?  Well, I haven't.  Is it always super-fun?  Heck no!  And I didn't force it on my birthday or during our stay-cation.  Still, overall it's been a really great thing!  Here's the latest crop of photos:

One day, we made sponge bombs like these.

And we had a huge water fight.  I wanted to do relay races and stuff, but the kids weren't interested.  They just wanted to pummel each other.

Afterward, we had a cheese and cracker picnic on the lawn while they dried off a little bit.

We spent a good part of one Tech-Free Tuesday (and a good chunk of money too) making a really cool quiet book for church.

Here's a picture of the finished product.

One of the activities:  We laminated these simple pictures and the kids embellish them with dry erase markers.

Sewing cards.

Josh especially loves these button snakes - and it helps with hand-eye coordination.

On another Tech-Free Tuesday, we held our first ever "Popcorn Olympics!"  In this event, they had to see how many pieces they could get into a bowl across the room.  

In a similar event, they tried to get popcorn into a cup from way up high.

Here's the popcorn shot put.  It's harder than it looks. 

Then we had the popcorn catch.  Nicki easily took the gold medal on this one - none of the rest of us can throw a piece of popcorn into the air and catch it in our mouths.  

Then, we had a balancing event.

The team mouth catching event was a dud!  It's SUPER hard - especially when half of your team is a little boy.  You should have seen poor Nicki and Bronson.

Our final event was a straw blowing race.

On another Tech-Free Tuesday, we tie-dyed some clothes. We had a really great time, and only ruined a couple of articles of clothing in the process. 

End of Stay-cation

Friday was technically the last day of our little family stay-cation.  We started out by going to tennis lessons.  When they were finished, we went home and had a big lunch.  Then, we packed up in the car and headed to South Salt Lake for the climax of our whole week - the AQUARIUM!

The Living Planet Aquarium is new.  It's only been open for a few months.  We were all excited to see it.  It was very expensive, but it looked really great and we all wanted to see it.  So we dove all the way down there, but when we arrived, we were very disappointed.  There was a line four people across coming out of the doors and about 200 yards long.  We could tell that it would take an hour or more just to get inside.  We decided not to go.  We were all so sad!  This was our last day, so we couldn't really juggle activities around - we'd already done everything and spent all our budget money.  We were too full from lunch to even want to go out to eat at a fun SLC restaurant.  We had NO idea what to do instead.

That's when we came up with the brilliant idea to hit the closest D.I. we could find and get the kids a "souvenir" from our stay-cation.  We found a D. I. in South Jordan.  I'm telling you, that may have been the highlight of our whole week for the kids.  They're easy to please. It's kind of like a baby who'd rather play with the box than the toy that comes inside.  Each kid found their prefect toy - Bronson found a tricycle scooter (I'm so glad he has it - he rides it every single day!).  Josh and Nicole both chose giant stuffed animals (which grosses me out, but I stuck them in our dryer at the highest heat to kill as many germs as I could, and I try not to think about it).  Alison thought she'd died and gone to heaven when she found three Harry Potter books and a Fablehaven book for $1 each.  Our little D.I. trip, along with the promise to go to the aquarium some day soon, saved our day!

Posing with their souvenirs. 

That evening, we ate dinner at the Layton Burger King.  Exciting, huh?  It really is exciting for our family because it has a pretty cool play land and one of those fancy drink dispensers that lets you combine different sodas with different syrups for 100's of drink options.  It just doesn't get much better than that!

On Saturday, we had our make-up tennis lessons.  Then, we went swimming with the entire extended family - a pretty typical Saturday event. That's about all I remember from Saturday.

I took these pictures last week, but they're typical of our Saturdays at the pool.  The only difference is David's beard was just starting to grow in on our stay-cation.

Bronson and Nicole drying off.

Cute Joshua.

I'd say, "Quinton supervised," but he slept through it instead.

Sunday was our 12th wedding anniversary.  Hard to believe!  Time really does fly when you're having fun - and being married to David is fun.  We celebrated with pastries for breakfast.  Yummy!  After church, we had some salmon and halibut that our fantastic home teacher/friend gave us.  He's an avid fisherman and he caught this stuff in Alaska himself.  I'm telling you - I have eaten a lot of fish over the years, and I've NEVER had better salmon in my life!  Ever!  It was a combination of delicious, fresh fish and a new way I've learned to prepare it.  Oh, man!  It was good!  We also had rice pilaf, a fresh salad, and a baguette with dipping oil and balsamic vinegar.  It was a delicious, romantic anniversary meal (with our five children).

After dinner, we had a little cake cutting ceremony.  At the last minute on Saturday, I called around to a few local bakeries and found one that was willing to make a small wedding-type cake for us.  We cut the cake and fed it to each other in front of the children.  They thought it was awesome - of course they missed our first cake cutting ceremony because they weren't born yet.  It was a fun way to get them involved in the celebration.

The cake.

Wow!  We've changed a LOT in 12 years.  And I don't mean that in a good way.

The boys wanted to give the whole "feed each other cake" thing a try.

And that was the official end of our stay-cation.  It was fun.  We made lots of great memories.  And we were pooped!  I think Dave might have been happy to get back to work on Monday so that he could rest a little!