Full Swing

Summer is finally in full swing and I am loving every minute of it. It seemed like it took forever to warm up this year, and with being out of town for a week in June it somehow felt like it took summer forever to start.

We got to hang out with Steph (John's sister) and Eric for a few days and that helped get things rolling. They are very serious people. (I'm not sure who took this picture but I think it's funny.)

We BBQ'ed went to a cute little ice cream shop (that I will be visiting again soon hopefully) went to the park where I watched both of my children climb up a massive hill...I still can't believe Owen climbed up and down by himself. Luckily he had an aunt and uncle here because his pregnant mother was in no condition to hike to the top with him! (If you click on the picture and zoom in you might be able to pick out some blurry figures...Steph, Eric, Ains, and Owen.)
Since then we have been packing our days with summer things. That's what I love about summer, you can be super busy, but it's busy doing fun things. There's just something nice about being busy doing nothing in particular. I intentionally refuse sign my kids up for summer activities so that we are free to play and see where the days take us. I guess I just like having a few months of the year where there is no such thing as a schedule. We are playing hard at parks. Swimming a ton, sometimes twice a day, working in the yard, playing with friends and enjoying the outdoors! Syd has been teaching Ainsley how to swim. She can now jump off the diving board (even without her goggles) and swim to the top and float on her back! I am impressed with Ains for doing it and Syd for teaching her.
We are also starting to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Our peas are coming on in full force. I think Owen has eaten 90% of this years crop! We are starting to see beans and tomatoes. We've been eating onions for weeks and our pepper plants are blossoming! I love being able to have a garden.

Today we went to pick surplus cherries from a woman in our ward. I LOVE cherries! We got a ton...and I'm heading out again next week to relieve another sister from a few of her burdensome surplus cherries. I just need to come up with some clever ways to use them since I don't want to can them (I make awful pies, and what would I can other than pie filling?) I'm thinking of making cherry freezer jam and I was told that if you freeze them whole they make great snacks...any other ideas???

The Best

The Best Part of Summer:

I can get away with calling an Orange Julius with strawberries dinner.

The Best Part of My Day:

The hour and a half I spent reading this ENTIRE blog. I was laughing so hard I was crying...read it and bask in the hilariousness of the twisted mormon mind!

http://www.myregisblog.com/

In case you're too lazy to push the button and read, I'll share with you my favorite....

A Parable

Do you like parables? I like parables. I don’t always remember all of the details of the story - which is fine because often when we hear parables in talks they are different each time anyway. As long as we remember the lessons being taught, which is really the point of the parable after all, isn’t it? So anyway today I thought I would share with you one of my favorite parables in case you want to print it out and share it in sacrament meeting:

One time there was a guy in the mountains. Or maybe it was a young man. Like an Indian kid or maybe it was a lady. Anyway, they were outside and in a rural setting. Maybe in a mountain or by a river. Or was it at a park in the city?

The point is she was outside and heard a little voice say “hello” and he looked around and saw lizard – or it could have been a snake. Or a rat. But either way, it had developed human speech and learned a rudimentary form of English. And it said “pick me up” and the Indian boy was like “no, you are a rattle snake. You will bite me if I pick you up” Or maybe it was a scorpion and the kid said, “you will sting me…” Or maybe it was an eradiated rock.

But the rat was like “no, I won’t. I am a nice scorpion, now give me a kiss and I will grant you three wishes” and the girl didn’t want to, but the lizard convinced her to eventually, so the man put it in his pocket and carried it down the rocky cliff and when he got to the bottom of the cave, she took the sharp toothed marsupial out of her knapsack and it immediately sunk its teeth into her fleshy calf muscles.

So the old lady looks down at the badger and says “you said you weren’t going to shoot me.” And the magic rock says “look Poindexter, you knew what I was when you picked me up” And the boy was like “well what about my three wishes?” and the rat said “nah. I changed my mind about that” and then it slithered off and left Brer Bear to bleed to death.

The moral of this story is that sometimes sin can feel good - in fact depending on what sin we are talking about, sometimes it can feel REALLY good. But in the end, you will go to hell if you are nice to the little jungle creatures.

Also I think the boy’s last words were “it mattered to that one” because the poison had reached his brain and he had become delusional.

Or maybe it was this one...

Church Policy

I agree with the church's policy about not allowing props during sacrament meeting talks. But the thing is, if a ventriloquist dummy is going to be considered a "prop", then I think they need to make that clear when they extend the call in the first place.

Because my talk last Sunday didn't make any sense without the help of Brother Woodrow P. Woodruff.

Or maybe this one

Family Home Evening

Too many people make excuses for why their family is not having a regular Family Home Evening. But the thing is, it doesn’t need to be a long, structured, spiritual meeting that you have to plan for.

Family Home Evening doesn’t even need to be on a Monday night to be effective. In fact, it doesn’t have to be in the evening at all. And you don’t need to be home - or with your family, for that matter.

In fact. some of the funnest and most memorable Family Home Evenings I’ve ever had were when I was hanging out at the horse track by myself.

Oh, who am I kidding, just trying to pick a favorite has made me want to reread the entire blog, or just repost it here on my blog and claim it as my own so that people would think I was that hilarious...seriously, take some time and read it!!!!

Vacation!

We're home from our week of vacationing. It was a lot of fun, but we were gone for long enough that it was nice to get home. The only reason we even went in the first place was because there had been a family reunion plan in the works for a vacation to St. George but when the plans fell through, I was too depressed to sit at home the week that I would have been gone. So we decided to go spend some time in Salt Lake visiting family and then go to Vegas, where you can get super cheap hotel rooms.

We left Boise Monday afternoon and spent some time with John's parents.
On Tuesday afternoon we took the kids down to BYU. I'm not sure why we went there this trip, we usually don't, but it ended up being fun. We ate at the cougar eat, shopped at the book store, and then made a visit to the Bean Museum.
What's not to love about dead stuffed animals? There are some pretty cool ones though.

Wednesday Morning we headed off to Vegas. We thought the kids would think it was fun to stay at a castle. And they did.

Maybe because I let them jump on the beds?

The night we got there we walked down to the Bellagio for the water show. I was amazed at how captivated the kids were with it.

We even went into the botanical gardens at the Bellagio. I had never been in there before, they were amazing, unfortunately we didn't get any amazing pictures of it.

We made the mistake that night of staying out too late watching the water shows over and over and had to walk back to our hotel with a little rougher crowd and past some skanky ads...luckily our kids were happily oblivious. Ains did great on the walk...as is proved by her black feet when we finally made it back to our room.
That night we also checked out a great little magic shop that night at the New York New York. A lady that worked there did some great little tricks for Ains, had they not been ridiculously overpriced, we might have bought one for her. We also went into a New York shop where John proudly took this picture....

We also visited John's beloved In N Out. He was in heaven. We ate there twice while on vacation.

I think Owen's favorite part of the trip were all the escalators, luckily Vegas doesn't disappoint in the escalator department.

The following morning, after some time spent in the pool, we hit M&M world and visited the lions at the MGM Grand. There is just something disturbing to me about lions that will lie down and be pet like kittens.

Our last night in Vegas we drove off the strip to visit my Aunt, Uncle, and cousins. It was really good to see them. I haven't seen them in years. I guess that's what happens when extended family lives 12 hours away. By this point John and I were stripped out and tired. We headed back to our hotel and after some bed jumping, we all crashed. The next morning we tried our best to get some energy out the kids before hopping in the car again by walking around the Luxor and Mandalay Bay and taking the train (the tram that connected the 3 hotels) which was also a highlight for Owen.

Friday night we made it back to Salt Lake. Our plans to hit the Timpanogas cave the next day were changed due to rain so instead we visited the Dinosaur museum at point of the mountain. It was a really cool museum.

I thought the little erosion area where the kids played in sand and water was pretty cool.

We had a BBQ with John's family that night and then headed for home on Sunday afternoon. It was a great little get away and a lot of fun to visit family, and we even learned a few things along the way.

Our kids are whiny, both of them. Two year olds are not ideal vacationers. John did battle with Owen on more than one occasion as Owen insisted that he was big enough to use a casino bathroom by himself, he wanted John to wait outside, not outside the stall, outside the bathroom! We would like to go to Disney land in the next 4-5 years, and we will wait to go until we can afford airfare...because we are not driving. But other than that...Awesome trip!

It's a.............

Girl!!!

Hopefully she will lose the alien like look we were shown today!

As a side note...I think our reaction was a little anti-climactic. We both thought it was a girl, so when the doctor announced that it was we were just like, "okay." Kind of a boring reaction...or it might just be that it's our third.

3 Events

We've had 3 things happen in the past 2 days and I have zero pictures. But I'll share anyways....

1........Ains can ride her bike completely by herself! She has struggled with starting and stopping by herself for a couple of weeks now and she learned on Thursday out of necessity. We were going to walk over to some friends house and ride bikes with them in their cul de sac. Owen was on his little bike too and I told her that I couldn't run beside her to help her start. She hopped on and figured it out on her second try! She is doing amazing and has been on several bike rides with John and I around the neighborhood!

2.......John and Owen went to their first father sons cam pout. And got rained out. They went up to Bruneau Sand dunes and toughed it out with a bunch of guys from our ward. They had hot dogs and climbed the dunes in the rain and then came home soaking wet and were in bed by 10:30. I think Owen was most excited about the fact that he had his own backpack to carry, and that he got to eat gummi worms. Maybe next year the weather will cooperate and they'll be able to stay over night.

3.......Ains and I had a girls night out while the boys were camping. I think Ains would have rather camped, but she got stuck doing girly things. We painted our nails and went to a girls party that was actually a farewell party for a friend moving out of town. There were supposed to be little girls there for Ains to play with and I felt a little bad for her when we got there and found out that her friends weren't coming over for a couple of hours. One of her friends mom at the party had ended up leaving her daughter at home with her husband, so they invited Ains to go over there and watch a movie with them. Ains chose to leave the party for a while and come back when her other friends were there. I ended up bringing her back to the party around 8:30, where we ate and ate (Ains had her first chocolate covered strawberry and about 5 brownies..that's my girl!) and hung out with friends. Ains played well with the little girls there and we didn't end up leaving until about 11:00. When we got home Ains insisted that we go ahead with the sleepover we had planned even though the boys were home. So we laid out pillows and blankets in the living room and turned on a movie. I think Ains finally conked out after midnight, and even though I was exhausted I watched the entire movie and didn't get to sleep until I moved to the comfort of my own bed at 3:00. Pregnant women shouldn't sleep on the couch. It was a fun night and worth it even if we are dealing with a very grumpy family today!

Comatose

It's currently 1:30 in the morning. I can't sleep because I took a 2 hour nap at 6:00 tonight and I didn't eat before bed so I finally gave into the sick feeling and got up to eat something and kill time on the internet rather than lay in bed awake listening to John snore (sorry John, but it's true:). Who say's you can't blog in the wee hours of the night?

While I was sitting in near darkness I hear a loud thud in Owen's room. But no crying. When I got around to checking on him this is what I found. I can't believe he rolled out of bed without it phasing him at all. Talk about a deep sleeper! The poor guy had his head just under his bed and kept whacking it on his bed frame every time he moved his head. So maybe it was a good thing I had to get out of bed to eat. Maybe.