Playing with Grandpa

The kids love playing ball with Grandpa:

Haylie and Eli

Haylie loves Eli and Eli loves Haylie. It's a match made in Heaven. Haylie just loves to see her friend Eli and whenever we are headed to where Eli is she always asks, "Mommy, can I hold Eli's hand?" Well, luckily Eli likes to hold Haylie's hand to so they get along great.

Mess

James doesn't really mind getting dirty but lately his is very aware whenever he gets things on his hands. Whether it's dirt or banana or ice cream - he shows everyone and repeats "mess...mess...mess" until we acknowledge that he is indeed correct and has made a mess.

Girls Lunch

Last week was such a great week with lots of good girlfriend time. Every few months all of my best girlfriends from highschool get together for a lunch or hangout time with the kids. It's the best time reminiscing and thinking about how we've grown from when we were young girls in highschool to now, most of us are married with children. Here is the whole gang:

Twilight Girls Night

Last night I had the MOST fun getting together with some girlfriends to culminate a 2 week saga of Twilight obsession. I started the Twilight books about two weeks ago after some of the girls in our Bible Study were talking about them. They challenged me to just try out a couple chapters and promised I would get hooked - I completely resisted, repulsed at the thought of reading a book about vampires... well almost two weeks and about 2300 pages later I am nearly finished with the 4th book!!! It has been a whirlwind 2 weeks but SO fun. Last night we all got together to watch the first movie and what should have been a 2 hour movie ended up 4 hours long because we had to stop it every 2 minutes for commentary, and of course some good old fashioned girly squealing. Thanks for so much fun girls and I can't wait for movie #2!!!

Father's Day

We spent Father's day at the cabin this year:

Raider getting his stick ready for s'mores:

Haylie snacking on the marshmallows:

We took a chance to get some photos of everyone:

Blankie

James loves his blankie!!!!! It's funny how kids get attached to things. Haylie has a little brown monkey that she has been inseparable with since she could recognize the difference between her animals. Well, James has grown an attachment to his blankie (we have bought him some additional ones as a backup - wish we had thought of that with Haylie). Whenever he sees the blanket (on the floor) where he last left it, he darts for it and drops to the floor, laying his face on it with a huge smile as if he is reuniting with a long lost friend!

Raider is 16!

16 - It is a scary thought I know. He will soon be in driving lessons - although not quite getting his license yet! For his birthday Raider wanted to go roller skating with some friends. They had a great time slamming each other into the walls and getting rejected by the teenie bopper girls who were skating as well. They have determined they will now be Friday night regulars - oh my! The little ones had a fun time too although they had to look out for the crazy teens and loud obnoxious rap music - I think next time the rest of us go roller skating will be a toddler time. :)

Here's Raider in the speed race part (It was very dark in there) - he came in second - Micah came in second to last. :)

Why is my mouth always wide open??

The girls held their own races on the carpet. Haylie is wearing her dress up clothes because she wanted to be a beautiful princess for Raider's birthday but I wouldn't let her wear the dress - only a little ariel shirt.
Kiley left the other girls in the dust!

All Aboard

Haylie is really into imagination games lately. So we decided to build ourselves a little train out of all the boxes from my photography orders. The kids LOVED it. They love pretending to go places. Haylie always likes to drive (which is the big box - you should see me fitting into one of those little boxes). Then we get out and go somewhere like, the other day Haylie drove us to the mountains and we climbed the mountain (the slide) to the top (the play structure) and we sat for awhile and rested, then went back down and took the train home! James just follows us around doing whatever Haylie says. It is so cute.

Haylie loves to make the chugga chugga choo choo sounds!

My Mommy Loves Me

Yes she does!!!

Canvases

For those friends and family that don't often see my photography blog I thought I would share a recent post about some pictures I took of the kids and had made into canvases. I am SOOOOO excited to finally have some beautiful pictures of the kids above my desk. Check them out HERE!!!

Rock Star

The next thing on my to do list is learning to play the guitar. I am absolutely determined to learn so I can play and sing children's songs with the kids. Now I just need to buy a guitar. For now though, Haylie is beating me to the punch using Kiley's guitar that she let us borrow for a photo shoot. This is our favorite song to sing - "You and Me Together:"

And of course James always wants to participate:

These videos are courtesy of the new little Flip video camera which Micah bought as a "Mother's Day" present. He had been talking about getting one for months and I happened to get it for Mother's day :) No really, it has been super easy to capture, upload and edit videos so I can share them more often.

Attempting Photos

It's nearly impossible to get pictures of my own children. I have been attempting to get some individual ones for some wall canvases and ones of all 3 of them for another wall. After 3 separate outings and one erased memory card with some pretty good shots on it - we are all about to fall apart. I finally think I have the pictures I need though - these are not them!!! :)

This one's not bad - Haylie was pretty easy on her own:

This is how most of the images were:
Nothing seemed to work right!

James was practically impossible - he wouldn't look at the camera and he kept running away:

Ah - yes - this is what we had to deal with: