Happy Times

I shot this video of the kids yesterday, and while I wasn't able to record at the most hilarious moment, I still thought it was very funny. Once I started recording Ains became more concerned with entertaining me than Owen. We get small glimpses of Ainsley and Owen actually playing together and enjoying each other and I finally caught a bit of it on camera. Owen sat and laughed at Ainsley throwing that yogurt in the air and just letting it fall for a LONG time yesterday. What was really funny is that later last night Owen was crying in his highchair waiting for me to get his dinner ready and Ains went to the fridge and pulled out a yogurt and started throwing it up and letting it fall and the laughter started all over again.

Cereal

Every morning Ainsley requests either cream of wheat or oatmeal for breakfast. Not the easy microwavable stuff, the real full cook thing. I have never met a kid that asked for these things. Occasionally we'll get the request for waffles, but those are few and far between. A lot of times I give in because I can't argue with feeding her something good for her. Especially now that Owen is a lover of cream of wheat as well...he is on a very limited diet still. I try to only talk her out of it when we are in a hurry to get somewhere. This is difficult for me being a lover of cold cereal. Not only the taste but the ease of preparing and cleaning it up. Ainsley only asks for cold cereal for dinner, and how could I ever refuse a request for that (we have cold cereal for dinner on a decent number of occasions).

My morning...

This morning I woke up dealing with the throbbing headache I had been dealing with all night. I woke up sweating because it is so hot outside. 107 degrees is the high for today. A child, guess which one, decided to pee on me. I had to go to Walmart. I now have to sit around and wait for a dryer repair man to come and attemp to fix my dryer, eventhough I'm guessing after he takes a gouge at my wallet I'll get told that I need a new dryer. That just seems to be the trend for us lately. Pay to fix it, then replace it. I hope something turns my day around.

General Audiences

I was glad to discover that my blog is safe for all audiences. What's your blog rated??

Our Fourth!

I forgot to take my camera with us all day! My mom took some pictures but it would require way too much effort to go and get her pictures to post, so maybe another day. We had a typical fourth though...for the most part. Breakfast at my parents, followed by swimming, and John's annual trip to Circuit City??? When John got up yesterday and got on the computer the screen was fading. We knew this was one of the first things to go on a laptop but who would have thought that it would happen 2 days after getting it repaired for another problem. As soon as this happened and we knew we needed a new computer I was guessing that we would have a new computer by 5:00 that night. I was wrong. We had a new computer by 4:00 that night. That's right, I'm typing on our new computer. While we were home giving the kids naps and some down time before fire works John was off on his shopping trip. And he came home with our new laptop (there goes my new kitchen table I had been shopping for).

And to complete our holiday we headed down to the park for fireworks. They actually haven't done any community fireworks here for years. So last night we went to the park for the show. Ainsley got to do sparklers. Owen was fascinated with the sparklers. And then the real show began. It was a really good show. Music was blaring through the park to go along with the fireworks and I think that makes them look prettier somehow. Owen was fascinated with the show. His eyes were glued to the sky. Ainsley said it was the most beautiful show in the world, although she missed the finale due to her whining. Typical of Ains at this phase of her life. A fun night though!

Water Park

We were given season passes to the water park here and last night was the first chance that we had to go (we were on our way there when we picked up our repaired computer). We all had so much fun. We got there and got our passes made up, it was very cute because they even took pictures of Ainsley and Owen and they got their own cards. My parents and Sydney came as well seeing as how they are friends with one of the owners (the one who so graciously gave us our season passes, I guess he figured he owed us from the diet) and can get in any time they want for free as well. It made it nice having them there because this was John and I were able to go on some rides. John even got nervous on a couple of them. I wish I would have gotten a picture of his face when he was going down the Avalanche. The first picture is of Syd and John on the racing slides (John won). Owen loved the kiddie area. He would crawl around all over the place and then dunk his head in the water. He wouldn't cry or anything. And if we tried to take him out of the water he would just squirm and wiggle until we let him get back in. Ainsley loved the kiddie area as well. They have a bunch of slides and she went down most of them, although she was too chicken to do some of the smaller slides. I didn't get any good pictures of her on the slides though because she wasn't cooperating and going down when I had the camera. And it's just plain dangerous to carry around a camera in the water and so it didn't get brought out very much.



Does it look like Ainsley is enjoying her ice cream cone??
These last 2 pictures were taken when Ainsley went down the only "big" ride she was tall enough to ride. She kept saying that she wanted to go down a big slide and she just wasn't tall enough to go down any except this one (pipeline mines) in a certain kind of tube with an adult. We were a little hesitant because Ainsley is a bit of a wimp a lot of times. If she gets water in her eyes while swimming she will get out of the pool just to dry her eyes off. But she kept saying she wanted to go down the ride with Sydney and so we tried to get her excited about it. I told her that on rides like this you get to scream and you don't get in trouble. John and I were going to go down the ride first so that we could see Ains when she came out of the bottom. As soon as we took off and got drenched in the first wave of water we both thought, "Oh great, what have we done?" The entire ride is in a black tube and there are lights inside every now and then so that you know what way you will be turning. It's a little rough and kind of scary. John and I didn't enjoy the ride at all because the entire time we were worried that Ainsley would be traumatized and cry the whole time down. When we shot out the bottom our tube flipped over. Then I panicked again. The water was to my waist and I was sure that Ains and Syd would tip and Syd would have a hard time getting her bearings and grabbing Ains. So as you can tell by the picture below I waited in the water and was racing to their tube as the 2 of them shot out. Much to my surprise Ainsley was smiling and laughing, their tube didn't tip, and Ainsley said she loved it. She told me that she didn't even scream and that it was really dark in there. I think Syd was nervous to take her and so the whole way down she was trying to sound excited for Ainsley. What a brave girl. John took her down the same ride later and she claimed she didn't like it that time. She now says she will only go down that ride with Syd, Grandma, and Grandpa. I was quite proud of her, and now we'll just have to see if we can get her to do it again next time.

Trouble

Yesterday we had a moment of panic. I guess it was more of a full day of panic. When I got on the computer in the morning there was nothing on the desk top but the recycle bin. Nothing at all. When I clicked on the start button at the bottom of the page there were no programs listed. Nothing. I immediately tried to get to our pictures. Nothing. No programs, files, or anything else. I called John and when we were both clueless we decided to call a guy in our ward that does computer repair (Ainsley's nursery teacher...aka the boy Sister Galloway). I took the computer to their shop and when they started looking at things when I got there all they would say was that things didn't look good. I was devastated that we might lose all of our pictures. I couldn't remember the last time we had burned them all to CD. Finally at about 5:00 last night we found out that they had been able to recover everything. What a relief! So the moral of the story is...if you haven't backed everything on your computer up in a while go and get it done. I know we will!