Thank you Deans!

About a month ago Jacob and April Dean gave us their outdoor playset. It is still in our living room but will soon be relocated to the backyard! Tyler just finished the new sprinklers and will soon be ready to lay sod, in the next 2 weeks or so. So, for now, the kids have been enjoying the slide and climbing on the structure in our front room. All of the kids that come over have loved it as well, thanks again!


Jacob and his buddy Ethan
Peyton and her betrothed, Ethan (just kidding). Isn't he looking at her so lovingly though?
This is her favorite thing to do, climb up the slide and then slide down, repeated hundreds of times.

Playing "with" sister

August 9, 2008

Micah got some dolls and clothes out to play with Peyton. The boys are happy to have a sister so they can play with girl toys now!

Bubbles Galore

For Ben's birthday my Aunt Jan got him a little red hippo that blows bubbles. Let me tell you, this thing produces mas quantities of bubbles at a very fast pace. It awesome. Ben went through 4 containers of bubbles in 2 days. Money well spent, Thanks Aunt Jan!

Puppet Show

One of the things I like best about Sundays is how creative the kids get and the toys that are rarely touched get to be played with. My parents got Micah and Jacob these puppets when they went to Cancun several years ago and Ben and Jake did a puppet show that Micah joined in later.

Dart Tag

Ok, so I am planning on blogging sometime at the end of the week. So much has been going on and I have been getting lots of pictures since Sunday. I felt like I really needed to get on here and get a few things down though. We had play group at our house today which was a huge feat for me, if you know me, you know how anal I am. Before I ever have people over I clean the house from top to bottom, not anymore, I am over that, or trying really hard anyway. I didn't do any cleaning, except...Last night one of my casserole dishes slid off the counter and shattered into a million pieces. Inside I think I was almost glad, because that gave me a reason to have to sweep and vacuum and mop the kitchen floor, and since I was already doing that, I might as well vacuum the rest of the house and mop the entry way! Anyway, there were a ton of kids here, most of our playgroup showed up and since it's spring break all the bigger kids were here too. It went really well, no problems, but of course all the toys that could be anywhere but where they go, were. This is not why I'm blogging though. The kids were playing Nintendo while I was trying to sort through the rubbish of toys strewn all about when 2 of the neighbor boys came by. Garrett and Sam. They are both 6th graders, or Garrett might be a 7th grader, not sure. They are really good kids with nice families though. They came by to see if the kids could play. They do this fairly often and I love it. It gets my kids outside running around and I think it's very sweet that they play with my little boys like there is no age difference between them. I hope my neighbors don't mind too much that I let my 7 and 5 year old boys be responsible for their 2 year old brother (he is almost 3 though) So, I noticed that the last few days they are playing together more often, I am pretty sure it's due to our dart tag stuff. We have had 5 guns complete with velcro darts (tons of them) and vests the darts stick to with targets on them and some pretty cool glasses too for quite a while. Well, if you know how anal I am/was I never let them play with them outside, and rarely inside, I guess for fear some of the hundreds of darts get lost. Ok, yeah, so what if all the darts get lost, they are having so much fun with them, we can buy more, right? So, they have been playing dart tag with the neighbor boys for the last few days and having a blast and yes, losing some of the darts, oh well. They may find one outside somewhere months or years from now and say, "Gosh, remember all that fun we had? I didn't take a picture, that happens, we don't have to have a picture to go with every blog, do we?

Scripture Heroes, Leg Wrestling and Stick pulling.

We decided to have some good old fashioned family fun on Sunday after church.

Uncle Bryan got the boys each a different scripture hero for Christmas a few years ago and the boys made them some building out of Legos.



Yes, these are not the most flattering pics of me, I know. I used to always beat Tyler at this game, I could beat most people for that matter. Tyler worked my trash! Mind you, I did have a c-section 2 months ago, and I have not had any exercise in almost 7 months! Yikes, time to hit the gym again!




So, Of course Tyler beat everyone at stick pulling. He let the boys each win, though I think they knew he was letting them win.






Tyler let us all go against him and pull but we still couldn't beat him. I decided to be crafty and put both of my hands together because I thought I'd have more strength that way, well, I was right, but sadly, I didn't think it all the way through and I broke our "stick". It was actually our flag pole, oops!