The disasterous devils

A few of the latest disasters...dumping Liv's growing seed from Sunday school all over the kitchen.  "Faith is like a a little seed, if planted it will grow."  That is until your twin brothers get their hands on it:

 

Dog food all over the garage, they found this quite an entertaining way to spend a good deal of time:

On art group day, they found this bucket of stagnant water to sit in while I was helping Liv with her shirt (a reminder of why I don't generally let them attend art group):

 Another current favorite is getting a stool out of the bathroom and flooding the kitchen with the water dispenser from the fridge anytime they realize I forgot to lock it.  Carter loves to love/torture London.  London is a good sport to his pulling of her whiskers and poking her in the eye and pulling her fur and such.

 

Starting a new trend with the socks on the hand?  I am forever cleaning up single pairs of socks all over the house from this new trend.

 
Another trend?  Sporting Liv's pink sunglasses on our walk to church.

Camden found the baby bouncer quite entertaining at this family party.

 

And both boys loved this quad ride though when it first started up Camden freaked out a bit from the sound and jumped off and ran over to me afraid it was going to run him over.  I finally convinced him to get on and go for a ride with his cousins, and he loved it.

Camden has perfected the fish face:

Cute Olivia

A few random recent pics of Liv.  She is always dreaming up the craziest of hairdos and making me help bring them about.

  

 Her current favorite outfit is this pink Minnie dress.  She wears it whenever it is clean and everywhere she goes.  She suckered Aunt Stephanie into buying  it for her while we were on our anniversary camp out.  The conversation went something like "Aunt Stephanie, look at how beautiful and delicate this dress is!  You have to buy it for me!"  And Aunt Stephanie folded and was somehow also convinced to buy some high heeled shoes to go with it.

We have been trying to teach her a little of the value of money.  So, I've started paying her to do little chores around the house (just quarters and such), but she gets super motivated when money is involved.  Then, she always wants to spend it the second she has earned enough to buy anything.  She purchased this Elsa and Ana coloring poster with her own money.  It took her forever to decide which dollar thing to get from the Target dollar section.  She laid all the things she liked out on the floor and ruminated about it for a while.  I'm glad she chose this.

 

Liv is obsessed with birds and bird houses at the moment.  One morning she spend all day gathering grass and flowers and leaves to make a soft next for a bird to land in at the bottom of the swing set slide.  She sat there singing next to it forever, and the she came in crying because no bird would land in her nest.  I told her that I thought birds preferred nests in trees or tree houses up higher.  So, then she kept asking if we could have a bird house.  She gave her dad a bird house making kit for father's day.  He helped her hammer it together and then she decorated it.  They bought bird seed to put in it.  I sure hope a bird decides to check it out soon so no more tears are shed.

 

One day she came in from the back yard dressed like so with this flower behind her ear and asked, "Mom don't I look beautiful?"

 

Liv and Kenadie dressed like Elsa...Liv is wearing Kenadie's dress and Kenadie is wearing Liv's because of course it's more fun that way.

Food and Garden Up-date

I made Tilapia with roasted radishes from the garden for our anniversary dinner.

Kinda dressed up the table with cloth place mats and a candle.  The kids really enjoyed that.

The garden is in full swing.  Strawberries and raspberries are on. 

Lettuce and spinach and radishes are over and done with, but I still have endless bags in my fridge.

 Peas and broccoli are almost putting out.  Carrots are almost done, nonetheless the kids make me pull them a few every time we go out there.  We've picked a few cherry tomatoes but the potatoes, green beans, corn, cucumbers, and most of the tomatoes are growing strong just not yet fruitful. 

Art group

Not sure how it happened, but my Olivia loves all things art.  She currently tells me she wants to be an art teacher when she grows up and now that we have started swim lessons also maybe a swim teacher too.

She expressed interest in doing an art class over the summer.  I looked around but couldn't really find anything for kids her age all the art classes started at age 6.  So, I had the slightly crazy idea to email all the Mom's in the neighborhood with kids Liv's age to see if they wanted to jointly participate in an art group.  We could each take a week to host it throughout the summer.  They all loved the idea, and we have been doing it weekly on Thursday mornings.  This is a picture from the first group. 

That many small little kids all doing art it definitely chaotic.  But look at how cute they all are.  And, the kids love it!  I figure I can handle that kind of chaos at my house just one week this summer.  A couple weeks ago, we made these cute fourth of July shirts.  I don't usually bring the boys because that could quite possibly make me suicidal, but I did this week because I thought it would be so cute for my kids to all sport these matching shirts in Vegas over Uncle Nathan's upcoming wedding weekend.

T-ball

We signed Liv up for T-ball.  She was excited about the sound of it, but I wasn't expecting her to love it too much.  She tends to love more active things, and there is a lot of standing around in T-ball.  Her absolute favorite thing thus far about the sport, is the treat and drink she gets after games.  She also really likes to hit the ball and run the bases. 


The majority of her outfield time is spent playing in the dirt.  And usually while waiting on a base she grabs handfuls of dirt and sprinkles them down the base line as she runs to the next base like it's magic fairy dust or something.  The spectators all get a kick out of that.  And she is usually wearing a skirt with her baseball T-shirt and often a sparkly belt to cinch in the shirt.  That's our girl playing T-ball.  The whole thing drives Derek batty who agreed she could play T-ball as long as I didn't sign him up to coach.  But, then his good buddy from HS that he grew up playing baseball with ended up as the coach and he roped Derek into assisting.  This T-ball team is one all-star T-ball team let me tell you.  Most all of the boys don't actually hit off the tee.  They slam it far into the outfield from a coach pitch.  I can't say that I've seen any other team coaches pitching to their T-ball players.  And Jason, their coach, makes them run the length of the huge outfield before games, and warm up, and actually try to throw the ball as if to get a player out during the game.  We have practice and a game every week, I would wager that no other teams practice at all.  In general, there are no rules for T-ball.  Each player on the team bats till they hit it out of the box, they run one base, and it continues until each player has had a chance to bat and then the teams switch places.  In the outfield the whole team runs towards every ball and fights over who get to pick it up and throw it.  My favorite thing happened the first game.  Liv's team was outfield and the other team had a player on first.  When his teammate hit the ball the player on first ran to retrieve the ball along with all of Liv's team instead of running to second.  Hilarious!  There are no outs.  The game continues until it's been about an hour. 

Hopefully, for Derek's sake the boys take a slightly greater interest in the sport.  For now, the love to play with all her gear. 


The boys and I usually go play at the park near Liv's practice field I caught them holding hands walking up the hill from the T-ball field one day.  So cute! 
This is at one of her games, they spent the majority of the game wrestling each other on this cement pad and then paused for a hug.  Love these cute brothers!

Jon and Steph buy a boat

Steph and Jon bought their family a boat, and we are reaping the benefits.  They took us out on Saturday and the kids had a blast!  We went to Utah lake.  It was a hot day and the lake water was the perfect temperature.  Our kids loved swimming in the lake and tubing!  Especially Camden and Liv.  Carter grew tired of the tubing a little quicker.  They all looked so cute in their life jackets and can't wait to go again.

Also that morning I ran the AF half marathon.  I was a bit of an idiot and played in a soccer game the night before and sprained my ankle.  It didn't hurt too bad at the time.  I was able to walk it off and finish the game, but come the next morning at 4 am when my alarm went off to get up for the race it killed.  Luckily, I dug around in the dark and found Derek's old ankle brace and wore that for the run.

 I got a small blister from the weird rubbing, but it totally allowed me to run my race.  My ankle did hurt the first mile or two but then loosened up.  I ended up running my personal best at 1:51:03.  My legs are dead now though: walking is painful, stairs are the worst.  I look like an old lady hobbling everywhere, and Derek has had to kick it up a notch to cover for all that I am too incapacitated to do.

Dad's Ranch

My Dad invited us out to his ranch over his birthday/Father's Day weekend.  He's so hard to buy for.  This year I brought him some cute pics of the kids, and I made him a strawberry rhubarb pie (his favorite) which we all enjoyed.

  When I told him that was his birthday present, he said he'd been craving that very pie, so I guess I did good.  The kids got all the rest of the Christmas presents that we never got because we ended up not being able to drive out over Christmas.  They were in heaven.
 



We decided Liv was officially too big to be carried in a back pack hiking now and didn't bring a back pack for her, but somehow she still manged to weasel her way into one.  Poor Derek.

We did a beautiful hike up Lamoille canyon.  It was over an hour to drive there, but so gorgeous.  The kids loved walking in the creeks that ran beside the trail.  Liv hiked the whole way up, and the boys hiked the whole way back.


Each night we had a fire outside.

 Lynn got this blow up pool, and it was so hot this visit that is was the perfect way to entertain the kids one day.

Overall, a good visit.

Wet N Wild

This year I have all the kids in swim lessons at my neighbor's pool.  Her 14 year old daughter who swims on the swim team is teaching lessons every Friday for $5/lesson.  I am doing it mostly out of convenience with my 3 kids, but I have actually been pretty impressed with how well she had been doing with the kids.  Every week someone almost drowns.  The boys have no fear and between the two of them at some point someone is sinking.  It's scary as heck, but I guess that's why we are doing swim lessons.  I get in with them, and I guess I should be glad that they are not afraid of the water, but sometimes I wish they would sit and hug the wall in fear like the rest of the kids.  Seems safer.

On the topic of water, we had our first slash pad visit for the year.  It has been so hot lately (high 90s and 100 degrees often).  One day the air conditioning was just not working well.  I finally gave up and took the kids to the splash pad.  Derek came home and turned the air conditioning off and back on again and now it seems to be working just fine.

 Hard to tell in these pictures, but Liv spent the whole time karate chopping the jumping water.  It was hilarious!  And I spent the majority of the time pulling up the boys swim trunks because with the heavy water they kept trying to slide off.  All the on-lookers got plenty of shots of my boys bum cracks.