Family Night at the Park

Jeremy has been leaving work around 5pm for the last week and it is amazing what a difference that makes for my sanity!  Haha.  He's only been getting home 45 minutes earlier than he had in the past, but it feels like hours, especially since he leaves no later than 6:45am in the morning.  That final stretch in the late afternoon/early evening is always the hardest!  I'm a wimp, I know.  So anyway, it's been nice to have a little more time in the evenings before we start the whole bedtime thing.

So on Monday, we went on an outing! About 10-12 minutes from our house is a "Nature Park", just a park with lots of trails and stuff, so we (or I) decided it would be a fun activity for Family Home Evening.  I drove while Jeremy gave our lesson on missionary work (we both just got called to be Ward Missionaries!  Woohoo!)  Our lessons are usually only about 5 minutes long, so this worked out nicely.  In fact, they probably paid better attention since they were buckled to their seats!  At the park, we chose the shortest trail, since I wasn't sure the distances on any of them and it was just right!

 Connor ran almost the entire time, except when it was uphill and he'd cry out "I can't run riwy fast!"

Learning about and feeling the moss on the trees.

 Eli's doing his best to avoid eye contact or cooperate for the picture.  Haha...

We saw - and picked and ate - some wild blackberries, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery with again perfect weather, which I'm sure I'll need to be reminded of when it starts raining in a few months...

 That's better Eli! :)

 Anna loved looking around until it was all too exhausting and she fell asleep. :)  Sweet baby.

What a beautiful Earth we have.  The boys played at the little playground and sandpit there after and then we had our Family Night treat and headed home.  Yea for Family Night!

Overheard at the Nowlands

The boys have been saying all sorts of cute/funny things lately, so I wanted to document a few before I forgot.  I wish I could add inflections in here, especially for Connor.  He's only 2, but he's very quick to pick up and imitate people's inflections and it's so funny to hear him say certain things.

A couple weeks ago when I got into the car to go to church (the kids were already in):
Eli: "Mommy, that was a good choice to wear that dress"
Me: "Oh, you like it?"
Eli: "Yeah, it looks really good."

Connor: "What? What's going on here?"  He says this all the time in the funniest little voice.

Eli (when telling me how to turn the sprinklers on): "Daddy told me that's how you do it.  I'm learning lots of things!!!"

Connor: (watching me put on some makeup). "What's this?"
Me: "That's mascara"
Connor: "Your scara?"

Connor: (started praying by himself a couple months ago) "Dear Henny Fadder, Tank you for trees, tank you for weaves, tank you for our bodies, tank you for Eyi's body, tank you for Daddy's body..., tank you for Eli's pwate, tank you for Connor's pwate..., tank you for Mommy's fork..., tank you for Costco, tank you for Park, etc. etc."  He would go on all day if we let him, just looking around saying everything he can think of.  It's very sweet. :)

              And more recently, he doesn't want to do it by himself: "Mommy, can you help me say 'Dear        
              Henny Fadder?'" Yeah, sure he needs help.

Eli: "I'm listening to my body and it's telling me he's hungry".

Connor: "I wanna bamana!"

Eli: "This is my threeth pancake!"

Connor: "Please can you give some me more?"

Eli: "Will you read me a story Daddy? Mommy hasn't readen me this one yet."

Connor: "Actually....[fill-in-the-blank]" So funny coming out of his mouth.

They certainly keep us entertained!

Astle Reunion in CA

I'm so behind!  It was a busy week last week, but I'll get to that later.  For now, here are some pictures from our reunion at my parents' house in California.  Jeremy was only there for a day because he had to go back to work and my brother was working pretty much the whole time too, so that was a bummer, but other than that, everyone was there.  Most of these pictures are from my mom because I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked.  My parents moved last September (or October?) into a beautiful house with room for all of us!  It was nice to have so much space and all be together.  They have a great pool too which of course all the kids loved.  There are 12 grandkids now and my sister is actually due today with #13! (Her #6!)  She is amazing and never lets anything slow her down.  I don't know how she does it.

Anyway, here we go...

Day 1.  We came straight here on Sunday after camping with the Nowlands.  Jeremy left Monday evening.

 Amy's Sydney is so cute - she always has one thumb in her mouth and one finger in her belly-button.  My little sister Heidi used to do the finger in the belly button thing too. :)

 These boys love Grandpa!

 Singing on Sunday night...

 We had family pictures taken on Monday morning.

 This was the "off camera" area.

 And here are a few of the pics:

I know.  Cuteness overload.

And the whole gang:

Fun in the pool:

Eating meals on the deck:

From their backyard, you can walk down to Folsom Lake, which we did on Tuesday.

Little fisherman. :)

I should have had this guy in his swimsuit, but that didn't stop him!

Sam and Rob.

Cute pregnant Amy!

These two look like they could be brother and sister:

 I tried to get a picture of the three 2 yr-olds, but this was the best I got.

 Eli and his buddy Russell.

 Grandpa getting Anna to sleep...or himself...

Doing crafts:

Decorated aprons:

We also went bowling one day.  Connor latched himself on to my dad the whole time Jeremy was gone.  It was pretty cute.

Heidi's B-day!  Heidi almost always has her birthday during some family reunion.  Lucky gal. :)  This was Friday night, and Jeremy came back late that night.  Yippee!

Sisters, sisters...

Playing Life!  Haha, we hadn't played in ages.  Sam had a slow rough start, but won in the end!

Our last night, sitting by the pool:

Cuties!

Aww, Wendy and Michael.

This kid kills me.

Vanessa and Eli - such a cute picture.  Eli loves his 4 yr-old cousins!!

And Connor and Garrett - only 5 weeks apart.

We also went to the park one day and played kickball, but I didn't bring my camera!  Most of the time was spent playing in the pool though, which was great!

This Week

Ah, it's good to be home.  Jeremy is working a lot, but we're still managing to do some things here and there.  This week was exciting because Anna started rolling over AND she got a tooth! She had rolled from her tummy to her back a couple times about a month ago, but on Monday she started rolling from her back to her stomach and now she does it all the time!  And a few days ago her first tooth on the bottom broke through.  I'd been feeling the bump for several weeks, but it finally emerged.  What a big girl!

And speaking of teeth, Connor almost LOST a tooth yesterday! Yikes.  I was sitting on a chair and Eli was standing in front of me holding my hands and I was swinging him back and forth when Connor walked by and BAM, he got completely knocked flat on his back with several bloody teeth/gums.  One of his front teeth actually moved - it's now sticking out a little, and it was really bothering him yesterday, but it seems to be fine today.  Luckily we have a great dentist in the family that we called and sent pictures to and he gave us great advice (thanks Rob!).

This week we also went to a playgroup at a park with some people from church, I went to a Relief Society Progressive Dinner, Jeremy had a work dinner, I got a terrible ear infection (boo!), we did lots of yard work,  we hung almost all the rest of our pictures on the walls, we made popsicles, and we went to a new (to us) park in our neighborhood twice - once with Jeremy on Friday evening.

 And we have over 50 tomatoes growing!!!

 Jeremy's mom gave us these cute mini-popsicle molds.  We made watermelon raspberry popsicles.  Yummy!

 Eli is getting so much better on his bike!  He's a cutie.

 You should have heard Jeremy's maniacal laughter as he went higher and higher on the swings.  Haha.

 Ah, trees.

 When did she get so big?!?

Jeremy has gone to the dark side and has an iPhone - paid for by work, or he wouldn't have done it.  He doesn't seem to mind though! :)

Oh, and the weather this week?  Out of this world perfect.  I'm sure we'll be singing a different tune in 6 months, but holy cow this weather is amazing!  It gets down to the 50s every night and then it's been gray and cool in the morning - not foggy and not clouds you can really see, just gray.  Then around noon the sky clears up to a perfect clear blue, it gets up to the low to mid 80s all afternoon, gets a nice little light breeze in the evening, and then cools down again at night.  It still feels weird to wear sweatshirts in the morning in July, but after spending a week in the blazing California heat, we are so loving the more mild weather!

Oh, and here is our new map!  I'm so excited about this.  I ordered this US map on Amazon and we have drawn lines of everywhere we've driven since we've been married (there would be more if we had ones from our individual travels or before we were married, but we decided to just do places we've gone together).  We also have little red dots of where we have lived.  We thought we'd been to a lot of places, but there's still a lot of ground to cover!  I'm anxious to see where the next few red dots will be...

We have this hanging in our hallway now.  I feel like our house is slowly starting to come together here.  If we were going to be here longer I'd invest a little more time/money/energy into making it homey, but since we're most likely leaving in 10-11 months, it will do!