Family Fun

The kids and I were lucky enough to get to spend a whole week at my parent's house before school starts up again and ends all our fun. The kids were kind of ticked that they couldn't get rid of me the whole time, but we managed to have fun anyway!
My awesome parents. They totally spoiled us!The first order of business was my little sisters' 30th birthday party. Hayley LOVES her birthday and it just wouldn't have felt right to miss such a big one, especially since my mom and friends decided to throw her a huge surprise party. It was so fun getting surprise her and to finally meet all her cute friends.
Isn't she just beautiful! We spent most of the rest of the week just being lazy -- watching movies, eating good food, shopping. Most of my favorite pics of the week involve all the kids snuggling together. I love this one of the kids all crashing on Grandpa while they watch a movie!

My cute brother totally stole Brielle's heart this trip. She forced him to snuggle with her half the week, and she's still trying to convince me to let her live with him!

The kids spent hours playing in the backyard pool. It was just one of those things that totally took me back to my childhood, playing in a pool in the exact same spot in the yard, playing some of the exact same games.

My mom always manages to cook up a few extra fun activities for all the grandkids-- this year they had a blast tie-dying t-shirts together and then they got to wear them to their surprise "snuggle-up" movie in the back yard. Too fun.

We wrapped up the week with a fun family reunion with my dad's side of the family. These are the people I spend most of my childhood with and we are still really close. It was so fun to sit and chat and watch all of our adorable children become friends that I nearly forgot to take pictures.

I'm thrilled that I got this one of Brielle and Sienna. Priceless.

And I actually remembered to get a couple of my kids attacking the seriously overstuffed pinata!

I hardly saw Breje the whole day, because she hardly ever gets to see my cousins adorable daughter, Courtney. I love that they have such a sweet friendship even though they only get together a couple times a year.

Cheap Thrills

So I have seriously been needing a project lately. Like bad. The problem is that I'm feeling more picky about my projects these days. I needed to know that I could actually complete it. I needed it to be quick. And I seriously needed it to be cheap. Usually I'm looking for some ugly wood to paint, but I found this bad boy at the thrift store the other day and it was irresitable---mostly because it was only 65 cents! It was even uglier than my picture shows. Tons of ugly rust and they hadn't even dusted off the cobwebs. The hardest part of the entire project was convincing myself to pick it up and put it in my car. I dusted it off and dug through my spray paint and totally hit the jackpot. I'd forgotten all about the pretty green paint I'd found on clearance that matched the pretty bench on my porch. I didn't have a use for it at the time, but it was only a dollar and sooo pretty!

I did a little antiquing with some black paint and voila! Brand new plant stand for $1.65!

Yellowstone

Watch out for this post, folks. I may have busted my "add anthother image" button forever, but I just had to share every second I could of our trip to Yellowstone. I'm not sure how I have this many pictures, since my camera batteries seemed to have developed a severe allergic reaction to my actual camera and kept popping out whenver I needed them most, but somehow I still managed to reach picture overload.

First up is our awesome cabin. It looks a bit dubious from the outside, but it was the complete opposite on the inside. It was beautiful, clean and fit us all perfectly!

We had a little bit of time after checking out the place before dark, so we hopped into our cards and checked out some lovely falls. I am clearly not a master photographer, but trust me, they were breathtaking.

First stop the next day was Old Faithful, of course. Fortunately we didn't have to wait too long, but I did mange to get some shots of our good-lookin group to fend off the boredome.

Grandpa and all his grandsons. Too great.

The Brielle with her beautiful cousins.

Then we took a jaunt to fishing bridge, where we did some shopping and got to hear the story of how Grandpa got chased by a bear while fishing there. The kids were in heaven. So was Grandpa.

Of course, no day at Yellowstone is complete without at least one tour of hot pots. Brielle kept finding ingenious ways to not have to actually walk the trail...

The buffalo, however walked right across the path just before us! I've never seen them actually hanging out at the hot pots, but they were snuggling up with them like they were hoping for a facial or something.

Day two was all about some guy time (fishing, where no fish were caught--so I guess it's ok that the camera wasn't there) and some girl time (shopping and eating, of course)

We had to get a picture of our girls with the giant stuffed bear, just in case it's the only one we saw all trip.

And we coudn't get through the day without admiring all of Hayley's handiwork-matching hairdos for all the girls (minus little Lucy, who's just not quite there yet)

When the guys finally gave up on fishing, we met up with them and visited the bear and wolf center, to make sure the kids could all scratch those animals off their lists.

And later we were completely surprised when Island Park put on about the best fireworks show we had ever seen. We were lucky enough to be able to watch from our cabin and it went on forever!

The kids would probably say that the best part of their trip was all the surprises from Grandma. I loved this shot of the boys using their brand new binoculars. We had to look at everything through the binoculars for the whole rest of the trip!

Our last day in the park was full of surpises, including a very up close look at this black bear! Our very first ever in-the-park-bear. Hooray!

We saw tons more hot pots.

And some more elk at Mammoth hot springs. Although, let's face it, the obligatory ice cream was way more fun than those elk! The best part for me was being able to spend so much time with my whole family together.

This one's for Grandma!

Brielle got this cute dress from her Grandma Linda's trip to Mexico. She adores it and I have to admit that I LOVE how pretty she looks in this color. My favorite thing about it, though, is how she feels when she wears it. Her very first comment about it was, "hey, mom, don't I just look like a beautiful rock star!?" Yeah, nothin says rock star like a Mexican sundress and a cardigan!

I finally painted!

Brielle's room has been torturing me ever since before she was even born. I knew that I wanted to do a brown and pink room, but her room is seriously tiny and painting it brown terrified me. Painting it pink was almost as scary. I finally came up with a plan about a year ago and it's taken me a whole year to get up the guts to do it, but I finally did it and I am completely thrilled with it! Doesn't it make you want to go out and eat some Neapolitan ice cream? Now I just can't seem to make myself put holes in the walls to hang up her decorations. Hopefully that won't take a whole year....

School has been out for nearly a month and yet we have only seen one day that actually reached 80! It's been a windy and rainy and gloomy, and really really busy. I've found myself wondering when we'd be able to get started with all our summertime fun, until I finally downloaded my most recent pictures. Evidence of summer is everywhere!

First night of the summer sleeping out on the tramp --- Brielle actually only made it about an hour, but the rest of the giggled until all ours of the night! It sounded beautiful. This is our first morning of no school. It looks like sheer laziness -- but I like to call it "everyone snuggling on the couch and agreeing on the same show and getting along and letting mom sleep in". Otherwise known as "bliss"!

I believe this is morning number two. Waking up to find your son reading to his smiling little sister is a serious treasure!

We've also done some baking. Like a lot of baking. Maybe I should not have bought that enormous bag of chocolate chips at Costco right before swimsuit season?

The boys even got to have their first fishing day with dad of the season. They FROZE to death and fought the wind more than they fought the fish, but they got their guy time in and even caught a couple of fish in the process.

I can't wait to see what we get to do when summer actually begins!

Breje turned 14, and we got tons of visiters!

It's unbelievably difficult to comprehend that my little girl is actually a 14 year old! Having her party right after Brielle's really emphasizes how much older she is getting. She no longer begs for princess parties and dreams about getting dress-ups and coloring books. Topping her list was a slumber party and, of course, the ipod! (Thanks, Grandma!)

It's a good thing she is such an amazing teenager -- it makes missing her childhood a little bit easier. Breje has an amazing testimony for someone her age and a very firm hold of her values. She's a huge help with her brothers and Brielle and I'm not sure if I'd still be sane (at least partially) if she wasn't so willing to babysit for me. I love that she lets Brielle have "sleepovers" in her room and does her hair and everything else she can think of so that those ten years between them seem so short. I love that she shares my love of reading and that she "gets" Pride and Prejudice. I love that she's even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside, even though she grows more lovely every day. Happy Birthday, Breje!

Her birthday was made even more special when Grandma Linda and Aunt Hayley (with the ladies, of course) made the long drive from Utah to come celebrate. We finished up all her birthday shopping and ate some yummy food along the way. My camera happened to be missing at the time and it just kills me because there were many lovely moments. It never ceases to amaze me that Ady and Kutter have still not discovered that they have nothing in common (despite spending EVERY SINGLE WAKING MOMENT TOGETHER) and Brielle and Sienna never seem to stop smiling.

It was literally an hour after this crew left that Jason, Chelsi and kids showed up for their first visit to this lovely town. It was so fun to see how quickly the kids connected, as they don't get to see each other very often.

Spending time with them helped remind us that there are positive aspects to our sleepy little town. We spent most of their time here enjoying all of our wide open spaces in the back yard. The kids braved the motorcycle together....

... and the horse....

... and I seriously wish I had a picture of how much they enjoyed our new kittens (the sentiment was most definitely not reciprocated!)

Thank you so much, everyone, for making our Memorial Day weekend seem a lot less dreary!