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!   

Potty Training

Guess who wears big boy pants???  That's right, my little boy has another accomplishment to add to the growing list of things making him more like a little boy, and less like a toddler.  The phrase "big boy pants" is one that I've said at least 80 times over the past week.  Let's just say we've been doing a lot of celebrating in the bathroom around our house recently. 

Here's a quick re-cap of the journey.  The past few weeks Jack has been giving me all the signs that he's ready to be potty trained (aka pooping during nap time and taking his diaper off and throwing said poop under his bed.  Yeah, you can imagine how much I loved that.)  But, with Jack being my oldest, I didn't know where to start, and frankly I had tried introducing the idea a couple of times before and failed miserably.  This time, however, the stars all alligned and it went incredibly smoothly.  My friend sent me an article she found on pinterest called 1 day potty training.  (Yes I'm one of the only 29 year-old females around not on pinterest.)  It had some really good ideas to get us off to a good start.  First, and maybe most importantly, we were supposed to ditch Ella and have one-on-one time the entire day.

 Yeah, I missed this cute little face all day, but Steve took the day off to hang out with her and Jack absolutely loved the one-on-one.  We started the day off with a quick potty demonstration by our newly acquired bath time baby.  She peeed in the potty (I'm not sure how many eee's that word has, but you know what I mean), and pooped a tootsie roll.  Amazingly, Jack followed suit.  It was only 9 am and we were off to a fabulous start!  After that we tanked him up on lots of snacks followed by plenty to drink.  We spent the morning making potty trips every 15 minutes, and doing whatever else Jack's heart desired.  He was in heaven.  We spent an hour or so doing art.  Which was followed by a couch snuggle and watching one of the ice age movies. 

Then we moved on to playing with playdough which lasted for a really long time!  Here's my bad mother confession.  I don't think that I have EVER spent the entire day playing with my child.  I play and interact, but most of the time it's whatever I can pull off while unloading the dishwasher.  And let me tell you, it was exhausting, but also so much fun.  I loved it because he loved it.  He kept saying things like, "hey mom, want to play fire trucks again?"  Such a cute boy! 

 And then there was quite a bit of playinig with the bath time baby.  After all, it's the first time we've had a doll in our house. 

He bathed her and then the two of them did this post-bath dance.  He's hillarious!  By this point in the day he was catching on nicely, and was completely over having me remind him to use the potty.  He took the initiative to go when he needed to, and now 5 days later, he still has only had one accident which was my fault.  I put him in shorts with a weird clasp button that he couldn't undo in time.  He stayed completey dry the first night which I still can't believe.  And here's the kicker, on day 3 of being potty trained we went swimming and he came over to me an hour or so into it and said he needed to go potty.  He didn't even pee in the pool.  He is fiercly independent.  He never tells me when he has to go, he just goes and takes care of business.  It is a great feeling to now have only one child in diapers.  I am so pround of my Jack!

Here's the big boy himself with his potty-training bribe.  We told Jack for months that when he was potty trained we would go to target and he could pick out whatever toy he wanted.  I was a little worried while he was browsing on the v-tec isle, but he came through and without any prodding settled on this $10 fire truck.  The only draw back is that it just may be the loudest toy in the entire store.  Oh well, he loves it!       

July 4th

Ok I'm on a blogging roll and since Ella is content watching our dog through the sliding glass door, and I'm trying to wait for the rain to stop before I go to the post office I'll blog about yesterday.  I think Steve and I have done the same thing for the fourth of July the past 8 years, and we figure we've got a good thing going so no surprising tradition changes this year.

We started off the morning by going to the Centerville parade.  Here is Jack in the mad scramble for candy.  He got quite the bag full, thanks to some help from his older cousins.  He was quite competitive about the whole thing and at one point skinned his knee in an attempt to grab a bag of gobstoppers before another kid.

He liked the bands more then I thought he would.  He was tapping his foot along to the music and stood up and danced along.  We may have a future tuba player in our family.

I was surprised by how well Ella did.  I thought she would cry from all the noise, at least in the beginning with all of the firetrucks, but she was perfectly content the whole time.  Afterward we went to Steve's sister's house for breakfast and let the kids play in the water.

In the evening we went with some of my family to a BBQ.  We went to our friend's house who we have had a fourth of July BBQ with almost every year as long as I can remember.  They had this fun slip and slide set up for the kids.  Jack is adventurous.  I love that about him.  The slide was fairly steep and long, but I just took him up to the top and sat him down and he went down without any hesitation and loved it.  He is a little tuffy and only cried for a minute later that night when he somehow upset some wasps and ended up with five stings on his hand and one on his face.  Poor kid!

To top off the evening we went to the Brigham City fireworks.  They are our favorite.  They put on a pretty good show and you can get close without feeling too crowded.  This is Jack's pretend scared face while we were waiting for the lights to go off and the show to start.  Once they started he wasn't too interested and just ran around and played in the dark.  About halfway through he asked me if he could play a game on my phone.  Maybe next year we'll just buy a box of sparklers and light them on our porch :) 

Ella once again put on a brave face and didn't cry at all.  She just watched and occasionally glanced up at me to make sure I was still there and OK with things.  I tried to cover her ears and hope she didn't sustain any permanent hearing loss!  She is such a trooper.  It was a long day for everyone and she was not a complainer.

A final side note.  This is my favorite 2 child purchase.  The back seat wasn't the best for Ella when she was tiny, but I absolutely love it now and have used it a ton lately.  Steve acted like I was trying to buy a BMW when I told him I wanted it, but he even loves it now.  I knew he'd see things my way!

Bees Game

One of our favorite summer traditions is to go to a Bees game or two.  They are our local Triple-A baseball team, and although they aren't always the best team around, the summer atmosphere of the game never disappoints. 

We sat on the front row of the upper deck right behind home plate and if we go again, that's where I want to sit.  It was so nice to just let Jack walk back and forth in front of us without worrying about him bumping the people in front of us. 

He spent the first half of the game trying to get the attention of the guys selling cotton candy on the lower deck.  He kept calling "hey cotton candy guy", but they obviously couldn't hear him.  After a few innings of that we caved and bought him a bag.  It was without a doubt his favorite part of the game. 

. . . Well, that and hanging out with a couple of his favorite people.  We went to the game with my brother Dalan and his wife Timari.  We have so much fun with them and Jack thinks they're great.  Dalan spent most of the game trying to convince Jack that the mascot bee is an alright guy.  Jack was never convinced and kept a close eye on where the bee was the entire game.  He definitely did NOT want to go over to him and give him a high five.  And yes that's a piece of popcorn in Ella's binkie.  Dalan shares with all!

This is the closest thing we get to a good family photo these days.  Too many people to get looking the same direction at the same time.

Family Pictures

In June we decided to get some family pictures taken.  That is no easy task with an uncooperative two year old.  For the last several months, every time I try to take a picture of Jack he turns his head the other way and closes his eyes.  So, needless to say, our photographer didn't have an easy time, and I'm still amazed that she got any good pictures of Jack.  She was so patient with him and I absolutely love the finished product.  Here are a few of my favorites!