Happy 4th of July

Friends to sit with!!

Matching Dresses, so easy!! Some cute little old ladies took our pictures, too funny!
We did have a good weekend. We did something out of the ordinary, we stayed home! Diddy commented that we have not done that for a while, maybe 3 years out of the 9 we have been here. We did a trip to the parade, outlet malls and then followed up with a party at our friends house. So fun. Then visited a new spot for fireworks- turned out to be great, and so awesome on traffic maneuvering. We will divulge someday, but not now!

Quote of the weekend:

T: Mom and Dad, I am so disappointed that no one sang any 4th of July songs. I didn't hear any. What a waste.

That's our girl.

you should grab this app!

If you have a smartphone- this is the most perfect app: INSTAGRAM. You may have seen these over on Facebook, but I have to document them on the blog too! One roadblock for blogging that I gave myself was the feeling that everything needed to be photoshopped before going up. Now I love the look of a little processing, but it can quickly push me behind. Plus, my free time is so limited now, I really didn't feel like I could do it. Then I discovered this app. LOOK!!!

T's Dance recital, priceless. Videos to come when I figure out how to load quickly. Grrr.

Here we are enjoying a family movie, our Sunday tradition. The kids dismantle the couch in the basement and then go to town building forts or minibeds. Daddy was the lucky recipient this particular Sunday.
The splash on the right would be the boy, jumping the gun and getting ahead of his sister. Still, it's the first summer that T. can go off the boards, and BOY is she HAPPY!!
A little slice of the morning routine. Neighbor girl comes over to play and it usually ends up being a game or dress up. On this particular day they decided to play Monopoly. Ambitious, me thinks.
Just a little glimpse of my razy trip to KC for a conference. Had online class while I was there too. I felt "as one" with my macbook.
OKLAHOMA JOES. Diddy said he would never have a reason to go back to KC until we went here. Now he is planning to make it a pit stop in the near future.
And happiness abounds when names show up on random objects.

Moving over to the free land.

New month, equals new changes! Hopefully these will be good changes, and the ease of this blog will help me be more consistent. I cannot lose the entries from August 2005 forward! I can't believe that I have so many written accounts of this time. Miracle. Now I just need to go about getting them moved into a book!

Anyway, today is July 5th.
Yesterday was the 4th of July, and hopefully later today, I will be able to share some photos from that. I have to upload all of our pictures and get some from friends first. Let me go back and pick up a couple notes from June first.


Look at this happy bunch. We headed over to the raptor center (right up the road) with our ward's playgroup a week ago, and I was pleased to get my first look at what is actually in the raptor center. Some very cool birds live there, and the bird blind was pretty awesome. We stayed put inside that little hut and watched woodpeackers, turkey, chipmunks, blue jays and a bunch of other birds come and eat just a few feet from our faces. Pretty cool, and bonus cool that the kiddos actually wanted to go back a second time and sit quietly for awhile. Check out Mr. Turkey walking around:


I got to attend a part of girls camp, love it! Nice and cool in Iowa until I arrived on the scene. Figures. Here is a shot out to one of the best pranks I have ever seen [at camp].What is that you say? That's an orangutan suit found in the basement of our beloved Stake President's home. This suit toured camp on the very last night, on the body of one nameless young woman. Created the best laughs ever. Funniest part was that she hung it up to dry out (it was misting) after she was done, and stuck it in the WRONG ward leader's car!!!! Thankfully, they had preserved enough good humor to give it back to us that next morning, where we set it up for a photo shoot. Ha Ha. Best thing at camp this year!