July

I really need to catch up on more of our summer now that school is in full swing and life is crazy.  Here are some highlights:

Finding an itty-bitty frog at one of Nate's t-ball games:

I completed a 30-day Book of Mormon reading challenge in July.  I loved it!  It was just what I needed.  If you've ever thought about doing something like that, give it a try.

This spoke to me one day:

We had a great 4th of July.  There was a mini-Atkinder gathering here and it was so much fun.  We hung out eating food then played some water kickball and had a slip 'n slide:

In the evening we came back to our place for dinner and then watched the fireworks from our backyard.  We sure loved seeing everyone.

I found this one morning:

I love my sweet goal-setting daughter.

Speaking of her, here she is reading at the park:

That cracked me up. :)

One day I up and decided, "We are going on a hike!"

I got some resistance from the clan but I pushed through.  We started off great.  Everyone was having a great time:

Sadly, soon after that picture things devolved into chaos.  The trail we were on was very bushy and we were fighting our way through.  Also, we were getting attacked by mosquitos and I forgot to bring bug spray.  So, we turned back.  Oh well, it was fun while it lasted (I thought so, at least :).

We did visit the falls and had fun around there.

Can you see my tiny children?

We had a fun couple of days visiting Tom and Lorna while they were watching Chris and Regina's kids.  Here is Eli and Maddie pretending to be each other's "cute baby":

One of Eli's favorite things is to ride bikes in the driveway.  We spend a lot of evenings like this:

Or like this:

He must play hard during the day to sleep like this at night:

Since Eli has older siblings who all receive allowance, he also gets some allowance.  He decided that he wanted to use his money to buy ice cream for everyone in our family.  He talked about this constantly.  After quite a few weeks he finally had enough!

Such a cute, generous guy.

One Saturday when Joe was out of town, and our house was in bad shape, we were cleaning machines.  I just had to text him this picture to get some praise for all our hard work:

We had a fun visit from Richard and Archer for a week (Toni came later, too).  The kids sure loved playing with Archer:

Nate was actually especially sweet with him although I didn't get any pictures of that.  He has always been so good with babies.

Joe and I and the older three kids drove to Rexburg one day to go to Simon's graduation.  We had a lot of fun eating their delicious food and letting our kids run around at their house before the graduation.  I sure loved their adorable little Genevieve and got as much baby-holding time in as I could:

At the end of the month we got to have Joelle and Randon stay with us for a week.  It was so much fun and they were so easy.  One day we took them back to the falls:

They had a cousin sleep-out on the trampoline one night.  I don't think Nate lasted but everyone else did. 

It was a great month--with some major developments.  More on that next time....