Summer's not finished yet. My kids have an extra long break since they got out early in Twin Falls (before Memorial Day) and don't start until the very end of August here. But, I have a ton of pictures and experiences to record so we'll break this up into two parts.
Right after school got out, we had a family gathering during which we were persuaded to do a cousin swap. We decided that Todd would come with us for a week and Elizabeth and Natalie went with Jon and Jaime. We had some fun times while he was here. He did get pretty homesick at times, poor guy. It was a long time for someone as young as him to be away from his family. But, he'd always snap out of it pretty quickly.
Bowling!
I got last place! The bumpers probably helped a bit, though. :)
We watched a lot of Star Wars:
(We're still working on Nate's thumb-sucking...)
We had a really fun time going to Nat-Soo-Pah hot springs with Shari, TJ and Matt:
The girls were sure having a blast. Jaime is more fun than me. :) They had their own Chopped cooking challenge:
They slept outside:
They went ice-blocking! And they played and played:
They also worked on a Brain Chase Library Challenge that was taking place in Salt Lake City. They managed to figure out the puzzle but they couldn't get to the library in time before it closed. It was so sad. They all wanted to split that prize money. I think they felt good that they solved it, though.
After taking the boys to Nat-Soo-Pah, I had to take the girls when they got back. Especially since Elizabeth missed going on her class trip there the day of Grandma's funeral.
We had another fun day:
Nate loved having me watch him swim.
Eli loved the slide!
The girls loved it too! It was pretty fast with the mats.
The kids were playing at a neighbor's house one afternoon when suddenly Elizabeth ran into the house looking genuinely frightened and saying that Nate was hurt. He was stumbling down the road holding his hand and there was a lot of blood. Joe was home, too, and we both tried to help him. I grabbed a basin of water and had him put his hand in to see how bad it was and it looked very bad. Joe put some paper towels around it and we decided to take him in to the ER. Our neighbor was nice enough to watch the other kids until Marsha got home.
We found out that Nate had stuck his hand in a metal fan. It was mounted in the wall (fairly high up) in our neighbor's garage and had only two cross bars blocking the blades. He said he didn't mean to get that close to it. The poor guy was pretty upset but luckily we got in fairly quickly and he calmed down pretty well.
Waiting for treatment:
Our ER doctor neighbor (who helped with Elizabeth's broken arm) was on call again and stitched up his finger:
8 stitches! That was a record for our family.
It didn't slow him down much at all. The shots were the worst part and after that he didn't complain of pain at all. I think he learned an important lesson, though!
These cute girls wanted pictures together before we moved:
Natalie sure misses Hailey and all the girls have been face timing a lot.
We went to get free lunch at the park one day with some more friends:
Kate, Hailey, and Natalie.
She had some water fun at another neighbor's house:
Of all the kids, Natalie probably had it best in our Idaho neighborhood. There were tons of girls close to her age.
On to our summer in Idaho...
Here's a random shot one of the kids took of our sandwich station before a trip to the beach to meet up with Chris and Lisa and their kids.
It was a great day, even though it was quite cold. We saw tons of dolphins and loved watching this guy play in the waves right by us:
I did eventually get in the water and had fun boogie-boarding with Emily and Abby. My hands and feet got so numb though! My fingers were white until we finally left the beach to go up to the pool area and sat in the hot tub. We finished the day off with Pizza My Heart and Mariann's ice cream:
What a great day!
We had a fun 4th of July. We invited Mary, Andrew and Luke over for a BBQ. We had delicious burgers, corn on the cob, chips, and watermelon outside under our big persimmon tree. Then we had some karaoke fun.
These guys don't mess around. They are karaoke pros:
We need to step up our game. I think that might have been "Coming to America" by Neil Diamond. Classic.
Our four firecrackers:
We opted to stay home this year and just had a little fun with poppers, snakes, etc.
I snapped this picture after coming from our first trip to the library here:
Those are fliers for all the different summer activities they had going on. Crazy! They have story times in Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin & Marathi (I'd never heard of that language!).
We went a fun puppet show there:
One Sunday we drove to Joe's office to take some things for his office. It was a beautiful day:
The view from his little balcony:
We stopped by the temple on the way home:
Crazy kids.
I babysat some little kids in our ward for a family that was moving out and they had a blast playing with play dough the whole time. I had to take some pictures of their creations:
Elizabeth loves making these little animals that get smaller and smaller:
Tiny carrot:
Natalie's pie with blueberries inside:
Nate's creations:
My cherry pie:
Natalie came up with this elephant disguise one day:
We did our favorite summer activity of biking to 7-11 and getting slurpees:
Eli made it the whole way, too! It's not far from our house.
We went to the local jump place one day and had a lot of fun.
Battling:
I bought a pass so I could jump with them and had a lot of fun. Man was that a good workout, too!
One Saturday we decided to explore Chinatown since we'd never been.
We had some super-delicious (not too authentic) Chinese food.
It was a lot of fun!
We became pretty obsessed with American Ninja Warrior this summer and watched every episode.
This guy had to be shirtless while watching:
One day we went to one of our very favorite places around here: Gizdich Ranch!
It was fun to be back. We picked tons of blackberries and strawberries:
One Sunday afternoon, our girls made this for us while we sat on the couch, complete with homemade guacamole and pico de gallo!
It was delicious! We felt like we had it made. :)
Sometimes this guy still falls asleep on me and I have to savor it:
We got to watch Luke while Mary and Andrew had a couple of days away. It was so much fun! My kids just love him and always fight over who gets to play with him/sit by him/etc. I snapped some pictures while we hung out on the hammock one afternoon:
Brushing his own hair:
I surprised Joe with tickets to see Jim Gaffigan for his birthday. It was so fun! I laughed so hard. It was fun having that time walking around the city with him:
Part two coming soon...
