July

For the fourth of July, we went down to Kyle's sister, Trista's house and did our traditional picnic with our hobo sticks. We also went to the park to see the parade and have some cotton candy. Rusty and Trista also blessed their baby the next day.

Kyle's sister, Megan, was getting rid of some things and sold us some bikes and this bike trailer. We have loved them! It is so nice to just use the bike trailer when we go down the street to visit grandma.
This was our 24th of July primary activity where the kids dressed up and did a little parade around the block. I love my little pioneer girls!
I love this picture of Kyle and Claire at the 24th of July parade! We had tons of fun and TONS of candy. The kids also caught two goldfish during the games at the park (both of which have since met their demise:( )

My brother's kids were here for a while for Pageant practice and also my sister's daughter. I took all the kids swimming last week and they had a ball and they were all good! Yay!
Here's Claire, just loungin' by the pool!
I have loved having a garden this year. Here is some of our corn that is almost ready to pick and the bottom is a picture of one of our pumpkins. (Notice how I took some close ups so that you couldn't see my large weed patch too:) We planted several different varieties of pumpkins, peas, beans and crook neck squash. As Claire would say, MMM, Num Num:)

End of School

Kirsten absolutely loved preschool this year with Miss Amanda. Kirst has always been kind of a shy kid. She never wanted to sing with the primary in Sacrament Meeting and she always had a hard time going to Primary without me. I was afraid that she would get scared at her preschool program and not want to do her parts and sing with the other kids. She totally blew me away with how brave she was! They did the cutest song and dance and I had the biggest smile on my face through the whole thing! I was so proud of her! Now about singing in Sacrament meeting...


Then two weeks ago, I was asked to come and speak to my father-in-law's ward who were doing a youth conference at Dance Hall Rock (above) and the Hole in the rock. I had never done a fireside without my dad and my brother so I was a little nervous but Kyle spoke before me and it went really well.
Kirsten loved being on the desert for this trip and kept chasing lizards and naming them. We took this picture of her on a giant lizard at the visitor's center.

Jannika also had her end of the year program where the kids did a jungle play. She was a monkey and did really well with her part despite having broken her arm the day before! Yeah, she was running inside the school from recess and ran into a boy. She put her arms out in front of her and broke one of the bones in her left arm. She stayed at school and didn't have tons of pain but didn't want to play the piano that night and it swelled up really bad so we took her to the doctor and got a cast put on. She's a trooper!

Busy Busy

Last week was pretty busy for us! We started out with Jannika's 7th birthday. Her favorite gift was a butterfly garden (don't ya LOVE those commercials that make kids beg you for bumpits or a shoes-under? :) This was actually a very cool (and educational) gift!

She had a "J" birthday party where the girls had to wear things that started with J (jeans, jackets, etc), we had a jump-rope competition, learned to play jacks, guessed how many jelly beans were in a jar and had a J shaped cake! (This is one of those times when the horseshoe cake pan your family has had since 1972 comes in handy!)

Notice the girl second from the right wearing Jammies, a jumprope around her waist, a jacket, jacks and jack-o-lanterns for a necklace. She definitely won the prize!
The rest of the week included having about 15 young men crash our house for an activity on Tuesday, some friends over for dinner on Wednesday, crazy cleaning and baking for a baby shower at my house on Thursday and then making lunch for the faculty of the school on Friday. Whew. I know some of you are going "Is that all?" Well, that's kind of a busy week for me. Then on Friday afternoon, we packed up and headed for the desert for our first camping trip in our new camp trailer.
And what is this odd picture, you might ask? Well, it is a real live dinosaur dig. On our way to our camp spot, we stopped to see this dinosaur dig site. I think what you are looking at is a vertebre and a rib.

I just thought this picture was pretty funny of Claire drinking her 50th Capri Sun. She was absolutely in HEAVEN while we were camping. She loves being outside, getting dirty and riding her bike.

It was a great week!

Easter and a Birthday

4 dozen eggs colored+ 7 cousins that visited+ 6 Easter egg hunts+ lots of candy= tons of fun!


We had Easter egg hunts at Megan's house and out on the desert. Isn't it supposed to be hot out on the desert? It obviously was not this time. Oh well, the kids loved it anyway. It's a tradition in Kyle's family to do a hike with a bandana on a stick with your lunch in it so we carried on the tradition.

We watched a wonderful conference on Saturday and Sunday. I didn't know that the speakers are not assigned topics or themes and don't even coordinate with each other on their topics. That makes it even more interesting and inspired that they seem to talk a lot about the same things. This time I noticed a lot of talks about teaching our children and reading the scriptures with them. What a neat conference!
Claire's birthday is today so we celebrated yesterday with a bunny cake. She loved it and loved her new presents.
Here she is with two grandmas and below with mom and her new piggy bank toy.

What's going on...

So, I feel like I've been really busy but I guess I just haven't been taking pictures of everything I have been doing. These are some pics of our big Relief Society Birthday Enrichment last week. I'm on the enrichment board and we worked super hard to pull of this Around the World dinner. We had Japanese lanterns and colorful tablecloths and yummy stir fry and chicken. The food and decor were great but our speakers were a little off the topic, but what can ya do?

My bro and sis-in-law welcomed this little baby boy two weeks ago and we went up to see them.

These two cousins had great fun splashing and eating popsicles in the tub.

This is just a cute picture of Kyle reading to the girls. Jannika has also started to love to read. She sits on her bed and reads or draws sometimes before she goes to bed. She is still in piano and we are going to sign her up for swimming lessons this spring.
Kirsten and Claire have been playing a lot in their playhouse (that they got for Christmas). Kirsten is also into doing worksheets. She loves all kinds of school worksheets, especially mazes. She still says something every day that makes me crack up. The other day we were driving in the car and she randomly said, "you're right, mom, we do have bones!"
My little almost 2 year old is getting smarter every day but still doesn't want to talk a whole lot. We have taught her some sign language and we know she can understand everything we say but she just doesn't have the desire to talk. She does say mom, dad, uh huh and uh uh and uh oh (did those make sense?)

Aloha!

Aloha! My awsome, wonderful husband surprised me on my birthday a few months ago with tickets to Hawaii. I totally thought they were fake but slowly realized he really had booked a trip to Hawaii! He is so smart too because we flew out on our anniversary. He got a couple of birds with that stone:) Our friends, Robert and Heather, live in Honolulu and this beautiful picture above is right outside their front door. It's like an island paradise right in the middle of the city. They were so awesome and picked us up at the airport with fresh flower leis, let us stay a few nights with them and let us use their car! Aren't they awesome?! We had so much fun chatting with them every night until midnight and hanging out on the beach with them. Thanks you guys:) And thanks to my sister, LeAnne, Kyle's sister, Megan and his mom for watching our kids. You are wonderful!
We stayed on the North Shore for a few days and the waves were really big. We saw lots of surfers and Kyle tried a little boogie boarding but the waves were kind of kicking him around so we mostly stayed on the beach. We did find a little reef where we scuba dived, though. I had never done the scuba thing so it was cool once I convinced myself to actually put my head under the water!
This was a cool fence in Laie (where the temple and the Polynesian Cultural Center are).
We both got some killer tatoos at the PCC. Mine was--I mean, it still IS-- on my ankle. Ha ha.

It rained and was a little windy the first 3 days we were there but by the fourth day it was beautiful and I even got sunburned.


We visited Pearl Harbor on our last day and it was really neat and sad to see the ship and learn about what happened there.

Here's us and Robert and Heather on Waikiki beach on our last day. We flew out that night at 11:00. Here's the sun going down on our trip. Sniff* I'm so glad we got to go. Thanks, honey!