Where Has The Summer Gone?

I can't believe that August is quickly coming to an end!  This summer has flown by like they always do, and although I'll miss the sunshine, I'm ready for a little break from the heat.  It has been a hot one.  Nothing too exciting around our house lately.  Just a few things I want to write down so I won't forget. 

Sorry for the small phone picture!

This little guy had his 3 year well check a week ago and is doing great.  He weighed 31lbs (50th percentile) and was 37 1/4 inches tall (55th percentile).  This wasn't what he wore to the doctor, but rather what he picked to wear to the grocery store yesterday.  He loves these boots tells me he can climb up the wall in them.  I saw what he meant by that the other day.  He grabs onto the rod in his closed and walks up the wall until he's upside down.  It is a pretty cool trick.  It's a little embarrassing taking him out in public like this, but really you never know when the first snow storm of the season could drop in on us.  He is really funny right now.  I have been trying to remember a few of my favorite lines so that I could record them.  A perfect example of his little personality came from a conversation I had with him the other day.  He doesn't love to put his pants back on after he goes potty and loves running around the house with his little naked bum.  Not a big deal, but he is starting preschool in a couple of weeks so I told him that if he doesn't put his undies back on the other kids will say, "I see your bum, I see your bum."  To which immediately replied, "then I will hit them."  And. . . there's not a doubt in my mind that he would.  He's very spunky :)  He wants to be a pirate for Halloween and a couple weeks ago I bought him a pirate sword from the party section at Target.  He loves that thing!  He and Steve were having a sword fight one evening and Steve said, "I'm Captain Blackbeard."  Jack didn't miss a beat and said, ''I'm Captain Crunch!"  A perfectly reasonable pirate name, really! 

Today we were at Costco and he saw a big poster that had a picture of a girl sitting in a hammock.  He pointed to it and said, "Oh no, that girl is caught in a net."  I could go on and on!  He's quite the kid, and he really gets a kick out of it right now when he can make his mom laugh. 

Little Ella is still as sweet as ever and sooo much fun right now.  She has two bottom teeth now which come in handy since she absolutely loves eating.  Steve and I had a bowl of carmel popcorn the other night and were giving her little pieces to eat.  After a few minutes of sharing Steve went to set her down on the floor and she started screaming (which is very out of character for her).  So he picked her up and she went right back to eating.  She is great and expressing what she wants without speaking.  Steve and I always laugh and how well she communicates.  She will eat anything and has been loving all the fresh steamed veggies I've been cooking up for her from Grandma's garden lately. 

She is crawling everywhere and is super speedy.  She is also pulling herself up to standing at any chance she gets, even in the bathtub.  No bad bonks yet, but I'm sure they're coming. 

Here she is doing her showoff trick with dad.  We had to get a picture of it since I'm sure she won't be doing it much longer.  She gets a face when she's doing it like she know's she's fancy!  Well Ella may not have had any bad bonks lately, but Jack had a horrible one last Saturday.  We spend the day up at Pineview on the beach.  It was fun to take the kids and Tucker and just play in the water and the sand.  Both of the kids were in heaven.  We didn't take any pictures since we left the camera in the car.  We packed in quite a ways so we had to pack light.  It's a lot of work to pack 2 kids, a cooler, chairs, etc.  Anyway, that night after we got home Jack was up on the counter getting a treat off the top of the fridge (Yes it doesn't do a lot of good to put the treats up high in our house.  It just encourages climbing.)  He stepped off the couter onto the stool and it slipped on our wood floor and came out from under him.  He fell and hit his mouth hard.  He bit all the way through his bottom lip and bruised his upper gums above his tooth that hit.  It was a really bad fall and I'm so glad it wasn't worse. 

He's a very tough kid.  I think I have mentioned before that sometimes I wonder if he has nerve endings.  He cried, but just for a minute or two.  I was a couple feet away from him when it happened and I had a really bad scared mom reaction when I saw it happen, so I know that part of the crying was from me scaring him.  He was still spitting blood for quite awhile after he quit crying.  We were going to take him to get looked at, but it was Saturday night so we just decided to wait a bit and see how it went.  It stopped bleeding and the gash on the front side of his lip was pretty small so we decided he was fine.  It's healing up nicely, but almost a week later is still pretty swollen.  Well I'm definitely dragging this out so I'll just end with a couple of favorite summer pics from my phone that I saw tonight and wanted to post.  Sorry they're small!  If I make them bigger they're blurry

Fun Grandma!  These boys love her!

Bummin at the pool

Just arriving home from a morning jog with Mom.

I didn't even care that he did this since it occupied him for 10 minutes.  Busy little boy!

  

Bear Lake with the Binghams

OK I'm going to see if I can write this post about last week's trip without feeling majorly depressed that it's over.  We had the best week up at Bear Lake with all the Binghams.

Yes everyone, and that adds up to 13 adults and 11 kids, with the kids ranging in age from 4 months to 8 years old.  It sounds a little crazy, and I'll admit sometimes it was, but it was SO much fun.  We had a fun filled week of swimming, boating, relaxing, Olympic-watching, volleyball playing, and of coarse, raspberry shake devouring. 

The kids all got along great (and by great I mean that all the disputes were eventually solved.  That doesn't mean that we didn't witness any wrestling matches.)  But really, these cousins love each other a ton and it was so fun for them to all be together.  These are just the rowdy boys.  There are also 5 cute girls that didn't make the bunk bed picture.  And it's also noteworthy that Jack fell off the top bunk about 2 minutes after this picture was taken and landed right on his side.  Good thing he is tough!  He only cried for a minute!

We rented a really fun wake setter boat that I wish belonged to me.  It was such a fun boat.  Steve tried his hand at wake surfing and although I didn't personally witness it, or get a picture, I heard that he was catching on nicely. 

I spent some time on the water, but Ella didn't love the life jacket, so we weren't as die hard as the boys.  Jack spend a lot of time on the boat.  His favorite part was driving with dad and going really fast.  It made him sleepy though, and a time or two he couldn't help himself and took a nap.  He jumped out into the water with me one time out in the middle of the lake, which I thought was pretty brave.  However, he did not want to try riding the tube one bit.  Really who can blame him though?  That's how whiplash happens. 

This is not Jack napping, just him being the annoying picture spoiler that he is these days.  What do you do?  Steve and I keep laughing about the fact that Jack now thinks that we own the boat. He keeps comparing it with other boats that we see.  Today we passed a huge boat and he said, "that boat is bigger than our boat."  Oh well, he'll figure it out sooner or later. 

This is me showing off my sweet wake boarding skills.  And by sweet, I mean that I could get up fine, but the minute I went out of the wake I would wipe out in a bad way.  What can I say, I've only done it a couple of times and to me it just feels so unnatural to be sideways.  I prefer skiing hands down, but Steve is quite the wake boarder.  I didn't get a picture because I was being a responsible mother on the shore with little Ella, but he did great.  I love the beautiful Bear Lake water.  Apparently the pretty blue color comes from limestone deposits in the water.  I just googled it.  Who knew? 

But now we're back to real life and dropping our spare change into a jar for our boat fund.  It can't hurt to dream!              

Jack is 3

I can't believe I've been a mother for 3 years!  It's been such a fun ride so far.  Jack has a fun summer birthday.  It's a little tricky when it comes to school.  Steve and I have been trying to figure out when we will send Jack to school since he was probably 4 months old, and we still haven't decided.  That's the tricky part about a summer birthday, but the great part is that it always makes for a fun party.  That is, unless a wind storm kicks up.  We decided to have a party at our neighborhood splash pad with his cousins.  Just before the party started some dark clouds rolled in and the wind really started blowing.  Not ideal conditions, but it was still a lot of fun (for the kids).

Ella helped me with the party prep.  She mostly kept track of the balloons.  She was crazy about them. 

He knew it was his day from the moment he woke up in the morning.  We started the day off by baking his cake at 7:30am.  He woke up and wanted to do that first thing.  He picked out a strawberry cake mix at the store so when people asked him what color his cake was he kept saying pink.  Then they were surprised when I brought the cake out and it had blue frosting.  So it was technically blue, right?  He has been waiting an entire year for this moment!  He was so excited to blow out the candles, and knew exactly what to do!

 

Everything he got was an instant, huge hit!

Just what he always wanted, a dinosaur shirt.  He also loved his little audience

And the grand finale present.  Yes that was extremely hard to wrap!

I think he likes it!

Yum!  Birthday cake is even more delicious if you have to resist the urge to lick the frosting off for an entire day.  Thanks to all our great family for coming and making his big day amazing.  We sure love this little guy!

 

Wrapping up July

Summer has gotten busy lately so here's a quick recap of our past couple of weeks.  We had a great Pioneer Day.  Steve's previous job was headquartered in Portland, so he hasn't had the 24th off in the past, so this year when it came rolling around we didn't have any usual routine.  It ended up being a really fun day.  We went on a hike with the Browns in the morning up Mueller Park, and went to lunch with them.  Then in the evening we went swimming at the Rec center.  Jack loves that place and it was especially fun since Steve came too and could take Jack down the big slide.  Ella is a pool baby and absolutely loves swimming and splashing.  We then came home for a quick wardrobe change and lit some fireworks with our neighbors.  This is something we did last year too and it's a lot of fun.  A good, easy way to get together with neighbors. 

It was an amazing display of pyrotechnics.

Ella loved it too, and the fact that she got to stay up way past bedtime.

Jack's firework viewing seat of choice.

Two days later was Steve's 31st birthday.  We had to observe his birthday the day after since it fell on a Thursday and I was working.  We had a pretty mellow family party with just the 4 of us.  Steve had requested a doughnut cake which broke every birthday rule that Jack could think of.  He kept saying, "doughnuts are not for birthdays".  

Once we lit the candles Jack decided it was acceptable.  This little boy loves everything birthday right now, but is a horrible secret keeper.  We went shopping for Steve one day and when Steve got home in the evening he asked us what we did during the day.  Jack told him we got him a swimming suit for his birthday.  Oh well!  31 year-olds don't care too much about surprises.

Ella was fairly indifferent to the whole day.  Except the part where I gave her a bite or two of doughnut.  She loved that.  I asked Jack some questions about his dad that we read during dinner.  They were pretty funny.  I love his perspective.  A few he got right, and the rest were just cute.  He knew that dad's favorite treat is jelly beans (jelly bellys).  I asked him what dad does at work and he said, "lift boxes, color, and puter" (computer).  He's a smart little 2 year old.  Can't believe he will be 3 in just a few days!