Happy Birthday Jason!

We celebrated Jason's birthday with his favorite dinner and a cake with candy spelling out happy birthday, as well as will plenty of homemade gifts, cards and decorations:) We sure love this man!

Learning to Sew

Ali has been very interested in learning to sew lately, and Grandma was happy to teach her some things while we were visiting. 

She was pleased with the result; as she should be!

4th of July Rodeo

We went to the Rodeo in Galena again this year with our dear friends the Andersons. As always we had a blast. We drove the four hours to get there and then went to a small water park for a few hours. Jake loved that the slide had no age limit and literally went down over and over for more than an hour and cried when it was adult swim and had to stop.

After pizza for dinner, we headed to the preshow where they let the kids come into the arena and ride ponies, see the bulls up close, and hang out with the rodeo clowns. The clown rolled the kids around in his barrel; it made me dizzy just watching but they loved it and did it over and over! 

Jake's favorite thing by far was to ride the pony. The look on his face when I put him on the pony and he realized he was going to get to go for a ride was priceless!

Jake was exhausting and literally ran laps around our blanket for about three hours (thankfully the people in front of us whom he kept falling into were super nice!), and then fell asleep in my arms (maybe the last time I will ever hold one of my sleeping babies!). But the show was good and the fireworks at the end always make me happy. We then got to a hotel at about 1am and slept for a few hours before driving home (the hotel and it's breakfast were, funny enough, one of the kids' favorite part of the trip). A great time was had by all!

Colorado Great Grandma

To top off a great trip to Colorado, my grandma came to visit!

We had to get a four generation picture:

And then one with Great Grandma and all my kids:

We went out for ice cream with Emily and her her kids. It was a great end to our trip.

Colorado Denver

We had a really fun day in Downtown Denver. We saw the Mint, the Capitol Building, the 16th Street Mall, and a fun museum.

We stopped for lunch at Jason's Deli in honor of Daddy who was home working and whom we were missing!

Colorado Wedding

One of the girls my Mom did day care for got married in June, which was part of why we had our vacation when we did. It was so fun to be there and see her get married!

Colorado Mountains

My sister Emily and I and our little ones met my mom and the older kids up in the mountains where they were camping to do some boating and site seeing. The lake was so pretty it made the hard paddle boating worth it!

Logan bought that bird at a little museum they had there and the two of them were inseparable for the next few days.

Can you hear his "roar!"

Colorado Fun Grandpa

The kids had so much fun with their Grandpa while we were in Colorado. He went up one of the evenings they were camping and took them fishing.

And the boys each got to go to a Rockies Game with Grandpa! First Major League Baseball game for each of them.

Colorado Camping

My Mom took the older kids camping for a couple days and they had a blast!

Colorado

After St George we went to Colorado to spend time with my parents. My sister Emily and brother JD live in the area too so we got to see plenty of them and their families as well!

We found a baby bunny stuck in a basement window well, and brave Ali went down in the well and captured the bunny in this bucket to get her out!

Cousins are so fun!

Grandma found a garter snake living in her side yard, and also found a few snake skins that prove he's been living there for awhile! Eli thought it was awesome, and his mommy tried hard to be excited for him.