Slip N Slide!

My sister Jocelyn and her hubby somehow came up with this great idea to build a massive Slip N Slide on the hill behind their house with some big tarps - super cool!  They invited all the family over for a BBQ and to play on their cool invention last weekend, and it was a lot of fun!!  It turned out to be a surprisingly hot day for September, and the kids had a blast sliding down in it all different positions!  The Dads had fun going down it too, and even more so, throwing and spinning the kids down it as fast as they could!  Lee even sent little Scarlett down it - one time a little too fast and she kinda rolled - but the majority of the time she actually really seemed to like it!  It also formed a little pool at the bottom that she quite liked too!  The boys also got quite a good game of football going - it was cute to see Mason right in there playing along - they even let him score a touchdown once!  Oh yeah, and Mason decided he wanted to eat a bug like Dakota had to earn $1... sooo.... Jeff found this massive grasshopper and Mason worked hard at chewing that nasty thing, and eventually got it swallowed! I think I got some good action shots of it all that I wanted to share! (And some of the kids just looking cute!)

 
 

We also did a Food Drive for our ward that same morning, and it was a wonderful experience for the kids.  We had to deliver bags to a bunch of door handles, and I have never seen my kids work so hard - they were  all running as fast as their little bodies could go to try to get as many as they could before one the other ones got to them!  They just kept running to me for more bags and were disappointed when we were already done after only 1/2 hour!  They thought it was neat to pick up all the food for the poor people too - and Grandpa happened to be working at the drop-off station and thought it would be fun to put my kids in the big food boxes! ha ha!

Back to School

On Sept. 4, my kiddies went back to school!  Mason in grade 3, and Dakota in grade 2!  Griffin's still in preschool, but now has it 3 days a week instead of 2 - he REALLY was wishing he could go to Mason and Kota's school, and he especially wants to be in grade 1, but he is happy to go to preschool with his best buddy Jack!  Mason and Dakota were pretty nervous, but excited - Lee was able to give them all blessings the night before, so that was a nice reassurance for them.  I was pretty happy with their teachers and classes overall, but in all honesty, I was hoping for a few more of Mason's friends to be in his class, and I was pretty sad that Dakota's best friend Laura would not be in her class this year for the first time!  Those two have been pretty tight, so we'll have to do our best to have playdates to keep them together!!  It is strange to have  a much quieter house again now, and Griffin especially was at a loss of "what he can do"!  It's nice to be back in routine though - Dakota is in Dance, piano and basketball will be starting, and Mason has piano, Cubs, and basketball.  I kinda ran out of time for getting cute back to school photos, so here's my one lame picture that I took right in front of the school as we rushed to get there on time, and that's all I got!

Enjoying our last few days of Summer!

I can't believe Summer is coming to a close and the kids will be back to school in a couple days!  I can't decide if I'm happy about it - the kids are definitely starting to fight alot and get on each other's nerves, so I think some space will be good, or sad - it will be tough to get back in full routine with reading, extracurricular activities, making lunches, etc!  And we've had so much fun enjoying the wonderful weather.  Oh well, it will be good.  We were lucky enough to get to go to Calaway Park this week as a family - well, a family minus one - Melanie was wonderful enough to babysit our biggest handful, Scarlett, so that we could actually enjoy all the rides and stuff with the kids!  It was our first time going there as a family, and we had a blast!  The kids enjoyed all the rides, and Lee and I did too, until our stomachs started to feel a little queasy... I guess our bodies aren't quite what they used to be!  But we went on all the good ones, watched a bit of a magic show, and got some popcorn and mini donuts - lunch for champions!  It was great, we'll have to go back again next year for sure!  I got a few pics, but not very many...

 
 We also went to Chaparral Lake again this week, and the splash park in Cranston, and rode bikes and played around our house with the neighborhood kids!  Good week.
  On a side note, I always forget to write about the cute things my kids say, so while I'm remembering a funny thing Dakota said last week, I will write it down!  So we were sitting down and this man walks by us with a whole bunch of tattoos!  Dakota says, "Wow, that's a lot of tattoos, I would never want all those tattoos!!  One or two, maybe, but not that many!"  I kinda laughed and said, "Really, you would like one or two?"  Then I gave her the whole speech about her body being a temple and stuff.  She seemed kind of embarassed that she had wanted one, it was cute.  And then later in the week, she found some rub on tattoos in our house and said she wasn't sure if she should use them since her body was a temple!  So cute!  I told her temporary ones were fine! (:  What a sweet heart!
  Oh yeah, and in the same week, that sweet little girl also ate a worm!! A bug juicy earthworm!  Nasty!!  She found it and Lee kinda jokingly asked her if she was going to eat it, and she was definitely thinking hard about it, so I said I'd give her a dollar if she did!  Well, that helped her make up her mind and she actually did it!  Said it tasted like mushrooms! (Which she hates!)  Here's the video:

In fact, while I'm posting, I might as well post the video of the time she ate a grasshopper last Summer!  That one's pretty funny! She's got quite a list of bugs in her repertoire now!  How she got so brave, I will never know!  I wont even touch the things she eats!!

Swimming Lessons, and the Corn Maze!

Well, it's been a long last two weeks!  I've missed being at the cabin so much, it's hard to go back to daily life here and spending nice Summer days overwhelmed with trying to do stuff with 4 kids on my own!  Mainly just Scarlett makes it tough to do much with the other kids, but I must say, she is definitely getting easier now that she's walking!  She just loves to walk back and forth from room to room, picking up whatever she can fine and taking it to another location! (I'll probably have trouble finding something I really need one of these days because she will have hid it somewhere!)  It's very cute though, she seem so proud of herself!  Especially when she walks around carrying the boys' "light saber"!  They all call her a little Darth Vader because she points it straight out and tries to get them!  So cute!
We've just finished two weeks of swimming lessons as well with all the kids!  I had the older 3 registered and realized there is no way I can entertain Scarlett for 1 1/2 hours every morning, so I decided to put her in a class too so I could help pass some of the time!  It was a good idea overall, but also made each day tougher since I had to get myself changed and her at the same time and help the other kids get ready at the right times!  Stressful days!! I was literally counting down each day that I successfully made it through!  Plus the parented swim class with Scarlett was so annoying - I do NOT really enjoy singing songs and splashing in the water with a bunch of other parents and babies!  Especially doing the exact same ones every day for 2 weeks!!  Anyway, it's all over now, thank goodness, and they were all excited to have all passed!  Good job kiddies!
Today was a lot of fun, we took the kids to the Corn Maze for the first time ever.  (My Mom and Joce and her kids came too, and we happened to run into some friends from the ward as well!)  Anyway, we were pretty impressed with it actually, there was a lot of fun stuff to do there!  Big Bouncy pillow, a petting zoo, mini golf, big slides, playgrounds, big and small mazes, bike tracks, pig races, and more!  The kids really loved it, and it was a beautiful day.  Here are some pics to share from the day!

Little Walking Machine!

The past couple nights, Scarlett has really been walking all over the place!  And loving it!  So exciting, and so cute to see where she decides to go and explore!  She was walking all around the house, going back and forth and around the kitchen for like 20 minutes!  At night seems to be when she does her best.... do babies actually understand the whole "bedtime stall tactics", already?!  It would appear so, because man, she turns on the charm before bed and I can't seem to put down such a cute little thing!  What a little goofball she is turning out to be.  I love it!

Ashley Lake Trip #2

So... we had so much fun the first week, we decided we needed to go back for another week!  But so as not to hog all of my parent's time at the cabin, we had to choose a week where no one was going to be there!  It worked out well though, because we wanted to go to the Annual BBQ and Talent show that we hadn't got to go to last year!  It's a great time to see all my cousins and friends from growing up, and usually some good laughs!  Our contribution to the talent show was a number from Mason and Dakota, singing the "I'm bringing home my baby Bumblebee song", but I changed the words from baby bumblebee to "Daddy-long-legs", and they each had a real Daddy-long-legs spider that they had found in their hands.  At the end of it, they actually really ate the spider!  Something they both have done quite frequently at our house (why they do it, I have no idea, but I think they both like the shock value!!)  It was a great, and everyone was pretty surprised! So proud of my brave bug eating children!!

The kids were also happy to have a day to play with their cousins - Skyler, Ethan and Ryley.  It didn't last long because they had to go home, but they had a good time!  Ash and Jeff also overlapped with us for a day, but unfortunately the slept in and didn't make any of the pictures (:

The rest of the week, we had a few days to ourselves, and a few days with our friends, the Irvines, visiting us!  It was a blast! We had so much fun showing them all of the fun things to do around there, and it was fun to watch them do things behind the boat they had never done before.  And it was nice for the kids to have playmates too.  They actually got along really well with the Irvine kids! And wouldn't Griffin and Mila make such a cute couple?! Parents can hope, can't they??

The kids REALLY improved their skiing the second week at the lake, it was fun to see them improve!  One day Griffin even got up the courage to try skiing, which totally shocked me because at the beginning of the Summer, he was too scared to even go in the deep water with his life jacket on!  But surprisingly, he skiied quite a ways - although he was sitting on his skis the whole time and couldn't seem to stand up!  It was pretty funny actually, I have it on video!  He tried a few more times, but then lost his nerve and went back to the EZ ski!  We were still proud of him though for even trying!!

The kids also loved to wake surf with Lee!  Cute!

Anyway, such a fun Summer, the weather was amazing, boating was a blast, and having time together and with family and friends was wonderful!  It was sad, (and a lot of work!!) to pack up and clean up the place to be perfect for my parents! 

Can't wait till next Summer!

Ashley Lake Trip #1

I've kind of been on vacation mode for the past 3 weeks, and haven't gotten a chance to catch up on my Summer blogging!  We spent one week with my parents at the cabin on Ashley Lake in July, and it was a ton of fun!!  As the kids get older, it is just more and more fun to watch them learning to do more things on the lake!  Dakota and Mason really took to water-skiing this year, we were really impressed!  Dakota has always been brave enough to try it, in fact, she first did it when she was only 4!  So she was more than willing and wanting to ski each day, and she did awesome!  She started out with skis and rope attached, and once she mastered that, we moved her to the other skis where the rope was not attached, and now she's mastered that too!  She says waterskiing is her favorite thing to do, and she looks darn cute doing it too!  Mason on the other hand always talks big, and thinks he can do better than Dakota, but as soon as he got his feet into the skis and into the water, he would freak out and decide he didn't want to try.  We knew he would like it if he would just give it a shot, so we pretty much forced him to try (using bribery and punishments!)  Sounds kind of mean, but just as we predicted, he ended up being able to do it and started loving it too!  By the end of our trips, he mastered the skis with unattached rope as well, and started "cutting" back and forth within the wake quite well actually!  I have no idea why Dakota is so brave and our boys are scared of everything, but at least she can be the example for them!!  Griffin enjoyed the EZ ski, and of course all of the kids loved tubing!

Scarlett was a bit of a challenge this year, since she still just wants you to walk her all over the place, and is miserable if you try to sit her down on her own!!  But luckily Grandma was a wonderful help, and we definitely took advantage of her 2 daily naps to get out on the boat!  She did enjoy the water though, and always just wanted to walk right on in!!  He he, notice the picture of her cute little bum cheeks on Lee's foot in the water?!  He was too lazy to get a swim diaper, so he just let her play in the water bare!! Gotta love it!

Lee and I both skiied hard this Summer, usually 3 times a day, or as many times as our sore muscles could handle!  The lake was absolutely gorgeous and warm this year, it was amazing!  We spent many hours in the boat and on the lake, hopefully we didn't wear out my parents too much, but we sure loved it!  It was also fun to just relax a bit, hot tub, waterslide at the Wallace's, play Mexican horseshoes, some Rook (even though no one seems to like Lee's "aggressive" Rook style!), some quadding, a little shopping in town, and surprisingly, one of Lee and the kids' favorite activities this year was chopping and hauling firewood!!  There were some fallen trees by the creek that needed taking care of, so Lee chopped them all up (he is, for the record, a very amazing wood chopper! I think he should enter the Lumberjack Tournament or something!), and the kids did hundreds of laps back and forth carrying as much wood to the pile as their little arms could carry.  Mason, especially, loves to work hard and try to impress!  It was a great activity for them.

 We randomly decided to get a family picture taken on Sunday, just since we didn't have a very recent one with Scarlett, and it actually turned out pretty good, I think!  Thanks to my Dad for even making Scarlett look happy!! And some cute ones of the kids on their own too.  Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I have 4 kids and they are all growing up so fast!