Summer Fun!

Here are some of the fun summer activities that we have been involved in lately.

First, I forgot a few weeks ago when I did the Memorial Day weekend blog to mention that on the Sat before Memorial Day when we were down visiting my grandparents' graves Karl got a phone call from his store. His assistant called to tell him that someone had driven into his store. Fortunately no one was hurt and there was minimal damage done. But some the bricks in the wall were pretty banged up and even though only a couple of them were damaged they will pretty much have to replace the whole wall. The wall is also concave now because it curves in now where the car hit it. You can't see that in the picture but you can see damage to the bricks.

Can you see the damaged bricks on the bottom left and the bottom right? They are the second row up from the bottom. It is hard to see in the picture.

Last week a friend from our old neighborhood invited us to a kiddie pool party. The kids had a lot of fun and it was fun to hang out with some people from the old neighborhood!

Steven is very into dressing himself lately. In fact he frequently gets up and gets himself dressed before we even get up in the morning. One day we were getting ready to go out and he went to his room to get himself ready and this is what he came out looking like!

Here are some pics of Summer, whenever we get the camera out she wants us to take her picture.

For FHE last week we decided to have root beer floats as a treat. Our kids looked so cute eating them that we decided to take some pics.

Every Thursday night during the summer our local library hosts a children's activity. Two weeks ago there was a puppet show of Celtic fairy tales. If you have never heard any Celtic fairy tales, they are really weird. But our kids loved them and all three laughed throughout the whole thing. The only problem arose when some of the puppets came out to the audience to "meet" the kids. There was a dragon that pretended to eat a boy and it scared Steven to death.

Matthew waiting to meet one of the puppets at the end of the show.

The kids loved this puppet who was pretending to be king of the leprechauns but was really just the janitor who cleaned toilets. No matter what you are talking about if you mention toilets kids think it is funny!

They also loved this bird who kept appearing on stage when he wasn't supposed to and always wanted applause when he started a scene.

The infamous dragon. Steven liked him fine when he was on stage but did not want it coming near him.

Summer watching attentively

Matthew and Steven watching. Matthew is in the light blue shirt and Steven is the little head you can barely see to the right of Matthew between him and the boy in the dark blue.

Last week they had a hands on art experience which they loved. We don't have any pictures from that one though. The highlight was when they learned to draw from Val Bagley a famous local artist who illustrates a lot of LDS children's books. We have a few of them. Tonight they are having Native American Hoop dancing.

I think we gave Karl a pretty good Father's Day. We made him french toast for breakfast and gave him a tackle box, movie and some books. We love him and are so grateful for him and the wonderful father and husband that he is.

Goin' Fishin'

Friday, June 5 we went to a car show. We thought our boys would like seeing all of the cars. They loved them and had fun pointing out some of the cars that they thought looked like the cars from the movie Cars. They found a Lightening McQueen, Doc Hudson, Lizzy, and Ramone. They had free hot dogs and drinks so we ate lunch there.

This is the car they thought looked like Doc Hudson, but a different color. What do you think?

After the car show we were going to drive to a friend's house for a barbecue. It was a bit of a drive away so we left early and stopped at the cemetery where Karl's stepgrandma was buried it was the only one we missed on Memorial Day weekend. It is kind of far out there but was sort of on the way to our friends' house so we decided to stop on the way. I don't know when we will make it there again because it is so faraway.

We had brought the fishing poles along and decided to stop at a reservoir along the way so the boys could fish a little. It was free fishing day so we decided to take advantage. The boys are always free anyway but this way we could help them more without having to worry about breaking the rules. We didn't stay long and they didn't catch anything. We ended up having to cut both lines because they got stuck.

Summer kept throwing rocks in the water. She was so muddy that we ended up having to go and buy her new clothes before we went to our friends' house.

We got a kick out of Steven on the ground fishing with his Diego sunglasses!

Little fishergirl

Steven trudging back to the car with his bag. He is always way behind us whenever we go anywhere. He just dawdles.

After fishing we stopped at the store to buy Summer some new clothes since hers were a mess and then went to the barbecue. We had a good time. Matthew and Steven enjoyed playing with one of their sons and we realized that as we were getting ready to leave that they didn't even know what his name was. They had been playing together all that time and hadn't even exchanged names. Steven kept calling him the little boy even though he was like 9!

A few days later we decided to try fishing again since it didn't go very well last time. This time we went to the ponds by our house and Karl bought himself a license. Once again we didn't have much luck. All we caught was a bunch of weeds.

We bought this red fishing pole for Steven, it's his very first pole!

At one point Summer got a hold of my camera, she took this picture and the next few pictures.

Who needs a head anyway?

No I am not holding the pole!

All the kids fell in love with this family of baby ducks. Matthew said "They are so cute, I want to keep one!" I don't think so Matt.

Steven wanted to try casting by himself but that soon proved to be a dangerous situation. He almost took Karl out several times.


Our big catch for the day. I think Matthew's face says it all! He said "I wanted to catch a fish, not weeds!"