New Kitchen Accessory

My neighbor let me borrow her Bumbo for the weekend. Don't I have the cutest kitchen accessory ever? :) (Don't worry, he was only there long enough for the picture & unloading the dishwasher.)

Pool Party!

Thanks to our kind neighbor, all of our kids, Curtis included, had a fun afternoon in the backyard. There were three pools set up for the kids, two of them with slides going into them. Quite a nice change after the two rainy days that came before the party.

Here's Amanda with some goggles. She was so excited to wear them & not get so much water in her eyes (one of her largest objections to bath time).


Our two boys. These two pictures are fun because they give a glimpse at the boys' eye colors; brown for Jared & still blue for Curtis.

Happy Anniversary, Grandmother & Grandfather!

Congratulations (and thanks) to Grandmother and Grandfather who were married 28 years ago today! We love you! (especially Mom, since she wouldn't be here without you two!)

Interesting historical context note: At the time Grandmother and Grandfather were married, the Washington, D.C., temple was the closest temple both to Ohio, where Grandfather's folks were, and Florida, where Grandmother's mother was serving a mission. So, even though Grandmother and Grandfather courted and lived in Arizona, they were married in the Washington, D.C. temple. Amazing how many temples have been built since then. Now there's even a temple right in the town where they lived!

A Day of Little Milestones

Note the logo on Jared's shirt. Amanda has been learning to read. We realized it was actually sinking in when she saw a shirt with the same logo on someone else today and without any prompting from us she announced, "His shirt says gap!" Meanwhile, when Mom went to get Jared this morning, she found him with his shoes already on his feet (Lightning McQueen shoes passed on from a neighbor; one of his three favorite pairs besides his cowboy boots and his crocs). And Curtis laughed a little bit when Dad played peek-a-boo. Then, to finish of the afternoon, Amanda got signed up for the summer reading program at the library. Yes indeed, nothing like children progressing. :)

Lucky Amanda

One of our neighbor girls, who got her first sibling at the ripe old age of 8, said this sweet thing today:

Amanda's really lucky; she's already got two brothers and she's only four!

Mom thinks herself pretty lucky, too, having cute kids to keep her company.

Our Fourth of July Weekend 2009

Proof that we saw the fireworks from our backyard
(Why else would we post a picture with a tree in the way? :)

As Saturday and the 4th approached, Amanda remembered her training from our little home preschool and realized that Independence Day was coming. She was very excited to go with us to see the parade in the morning. The theme this year was "There's No Place Like Home" and the three floats we saw (in the midst of classic cars and various community and school groups) were all Wizard of Oz themed. One of them by a local Catholic school had a fantastic setup with a small Emerald City, Dorthy's crashed house, a yellow brick road, and a rainbow bearing the words "Because of the wonderful things HE does." The whole Emerald city thing was particularly interesting to Mom, since where we were before here was Seattle, nicknamed "The Emerald City." So, does that mean that we actually live in Kansas? Isn't that where Dorothy went after she was in Emerald City? Unless of course this is the forest with the flying monkeys . . . we did see a couple of those in the parade, and sometimes it feels like we have our own here. :)

Speaking of Seattle, it's move in season here, and one of the new families this week is a family who was in our ward in Seattle way back when. Talk about a small world . . .

All in all, it was a pretty good weekend. We saw the fireworks from our back yard, and somehow all the kids slept through them, thank goodness. Mom actually got the Relief Society Newsletter out in a relatively time manner, and Amanda gave her first talk in Primary. Curtis continues to cuten, Jared is doing well in nursery and loves to play with rocks (we had to stop several times on the way home from the parade for him to do so), and Dan is continuing to survive scholastically. So, here's to the new week!