July: Family, Fishing, and Footie

June ended with an amazing trip to Utah.  

Eliot was thrilled with the planes, and the ride even though it included extreme (as in everyone screaming in unison) turbulence.

Th boys were in heaven at Grandma and Grandpa's new house.  They played things like "noodle wars" with the cousins for endless hours.

Bodie

Ira and Truman

 Midway's "Brag tags" were a good motivator for getting us out and about, exploring different activities in the cities.  Ira is still a bit obsessed with his tags.

The Simons boys teaching our kids how to bowl.

Playing in Grandma and Grandpa's water feature.

We loved meeting the new cousins:

Nelson.

Pete

Taggart

Watching Oklahoma (in Utah)

Music

And dance parties

Ant and I got to visit in the Timpanogos temple, where we got married.  Excuse the PDA.

 The boys and I visited my nephew James at BYU.

The BYU MOA.  James is one cool kid.  He got the art appreciation gene, I guess. :)

We had a little Francis/Lund/Proulx reunion, in which the guys imitated their before and after dietbet shots.  They lost about 60 lbs between the 3 of them. 

Beautiful Mary and Diane!

And the Francis clan!

Ira took this as we celebrated surviving a very close call in which we were almost run off the road into railing by a mac truck trying to shift into our lane.  

We arrived to Idaho for an Arave reunion and Molly's wedding, alive. :)  It was a beautiful wedding.

Playing at the Lake. Eliot and I were too wimpy for the freezing water.

But our polar bears weren't.

Idaho Falls, where we were staying, hosted the second largest fireworks in the country.  It reminded me of Marietta. 

We were able to visit a load of family history sights and learn about family history on the Arave side.

The kids were having a "who can make their eyes the biggest" contest.  For some reason the word "morbid" comes to mind with Ira's expression.  But Jean is pretty cute. 

I led a little practice wedding cake activity with Lauren and Addie.

For future reference.  A cake this tall doesn't work with one piece of fondant.  We had to get creative to cover all the crazy ripples on the bottom half. 

And then the kids enhanced it by making it an arctic, climbing, lego cake.

Also for future reference.  This much fondant, and this many rice crispies take 12 bags of marshmallows, and can last at least 3 family reunion sized potluck dinners. 

 Fishing.

We absolutely loved our time with family.  Thank you Quinns, Araves, and Francises for an amazing time!

Soon after getting back we had a visit from my sister's family, the Durants.

Australian Footie

Eliot and Thomas getting acquainted.

The Village at the Henry Ford Museum.

This is what the Durant boys look like when exhausted and taking a "break" by watching a 1920s show choir. :)  Cracks me up. 

Th boys with Uncle John.  Eliot didn't want to let him go.

My beautiful sister, Carolyn.  It was a short visit of 24 hours.  It's amazing how many happy memories you can pack in, in such a short amount of time.

Pioneer Day at the park.  That's an upside down marshmallow wagon.

That pretty much sums up our July.  Eliot's speech is still progressing and the boys are still overly aggressive.  I hope they survive each other's childhood.  But when they're not being too rough, they seem to really enjoy each other, thank goodness.  On to August!

June: Speech, Celebrations and Celebrity Psychopaths.

Hi Family and Friends!

I've fallen behind.  And the fun and businness of July have almost distracted me from writting about the fun of June.  So here it goes. 

It's summer!  We've been busy feeding ducks, rolling in the grass, and eating icecream.  I'm happy to see so many lightining bugs in Michigan, though they usually come out after the boys are asleep.

Our garden.

Picking strawberries with friends. 

After thinking about it for too long, I finally took the plunge and cut my hair.

Before:  Sloppy bun every day, with a headband if I felt like being fancy. ;)

After:  Freedom!  Nearly everything is easier with short hair. And lately a few people have told me I look a lot like Emma Hill.

I've never been told that I look like any celebrity, ever.  So I had to look her up. She's so cute!  What a compliment.

And then I found out that she plays a psychopath murder, and people usually imagine her wielding an ax and looking like this.  

Oh well.  Can't win 'em all.

Father's Day!

Ira really wanted to make Anthony rainbow pancakes.  That's right.  When we eat food coloring, we really eat food coloring.

We're so lucky to have him.

The boys decorated Anthony a cake all by themselves.  Their first attempt at fondant. 

And after church we went kite flying.  Conditions were perfect.

Kite overload.  Sorry, couldn't just pick one.

We were thrilled to have a visit from the Applebees, my sister's family. 

Chillin' at the Henry Ford Village, watching a vintage baseball game reenactment.

The Applebee kids decided to do the Color Run with us, which was a blast. 

They ran the whole 5k!

And a few of us decided to check out the Ann Arbor Art Festival.  Kristen and I were cracking up.  We were dancing like crazy to this awesome kid's band remeniscent of They Might Be Giants, while Ira and Jonah looked like they were having their teeth pulled, and just wanted to go.

Here we are exploring some of U of M's campus.

We loved having them here.  Come back any time Applebees!

One of my dear friends just had her third child, but first boy.  So some of us, got together to throw her a babyshower.  This was, of course, before she gave birth.

Diaper Design contest.  That's right, I was in charge of games. :)

Muppet theme!  I wasn't in charge of food.  But I did help a little. 

And the sad news of June, is that our dear friends the Wendts moved.  

So Lame!  We're keeping our fingers crossed that they'll decide to move back to Michigan some day.

In other news: We've had Eliot assessed, and it looks like his speech is about a year behind.  The good news is that he's developmentally normal in every other way, and our time in Utah (more on that next entry) seemed to really boost his efforts in speech.  He's making progress!

Both Anthony and I beat our dietbets (his win and weight loss was much more impressive than mine), and he came in second at work for losing the most amount of weight.  

Happy Summering all.  Peace!