Summer Vacation: St Louis

On our way to our Quillen Family Reunion in Branson Missouri, we drove right through St Louis and so decided to stop and show the kids the arch. Technically Ali, Logan, and Eli had been there (as 3 year olds and a nine month old), but we thought it was worth a repeat. It ended up that we had to wait quite awhile to take a turn going up and I worried it wouldn't be worth the wait- but it was! We really enjoyed it!

 

 

Wolverine

We thought Eli's sweaty hair made him look like Wolverine! 

The Addam's Family

Ali and I had fun supporting her friends at the play The Addam's Family. It was as quirky as you'd expect, but it's always fun to support friends.

45!

Happy birthday to the love of my life! We decided to go ahead and put 45 candles on the cake, and some of them were relighting ones (which was a surprise to everyone, including me!). The kids and I are sure lucky to have Jason in our lives.

Eli helped me shop for the cake, Jake helped me make it, and everyone helped eat it!

 

Happy 4th of July

We had a fun 4th of July with a ward breakfast, then a family outing to the pool, and a fireworks show in town. Jake wasn't sure he was happy about staying up that late, and Ali made the observation, "I can see why we haven't done this kind of thing for a few years...it probably wouldn't have been very much fun when we were all around Jake's age..." It was a fun show, though!

Happy 4th Birthday Max

Some pictures of the doggy to celebrate his 4th birthday! So glad Max is such a good boy.

Ministering

We're trying to teach our kids that ministering can look like a lot of different things. They're probably tired of us pointing out that having people over for dinner or family home evening, helping people move, inviting people over for a movie night, a visit to someone's house, a text, a card--all are ministering. Or ministering can be doing yard work:

Or drawing them a picture:

Or taking them with us to the temple:

All mistering!!