Summatime

Ok, it's been a long time since I've blogged. Our hard drive crashed and it's taken me a while to get our photos back in order. Here's some of our summertime fun. . .

We've been enjoying our house. I love that I can tell the kids to go jump in the pool or run in the sprinklers or go on a bug hunt or pick a squash. It's awesome.

We went camping with our friends, the Lims. It was crazy how much we packed for an overnighter. But well worth the work.

We were excited to take the kids paddle boating. However, once we realized that there were no seat belts or even sides to the back of the paddle boats we got a little nervous.

All of a sudden, Ryan's protective brother instincts kicked in and he told Macie that she had to hold his hand the whole time and she couldn't go near the edge of the boat. I'm not kidding, the kids were absolutely perfect the whole time. It was a brief dream come true:).

Happy us.

While we were hanging out at the campground Ryan disappeared. We looked around and found him playing baseball with another family. This kid is such a social butterfly. He had totally introduced himself and started playing all on his own. I'm sure that by the 2nd day of school this boy will have 30 new friends.

On the way home, we stopped by Baskin Robbins. Rich bought each kid a "small" shake. But, you can see that a small is really not that small. Besides eating it, Macie decided to wear it. It took a big scrub and wash to get that car seat clean. And seriously, we've never been more grateful for leather seats. Camping with the Lims went so well that we've decided we're up to more camping trips and vacations in general (I think traveling with 3 kids intimidated us for a while). That leads me to our next trip. . .Utah.

We visited Utah so that we could go to my cousin's wedding and a family reunion. We had so much fun. It was such a treat to watch my cousin get married in the Timpanogos Temple--the one we got hitched in, too. We had to relive the moment:).

Rich got to go 4 wheeling with all the men in the family. There was a lot of testosterone and dirt flying around that day.

We visited the Y. It's been over 4 years since we've been. We had loads of fun eating creamery ice cream, visiting the Bean Museum, visiting my old office and boss, visiting Rich's old home (the Tanner Building), and walking around with oodles of EFYers.

We hung out in SLC with Rich's brother, Keith. Our kids love Uncle Keith.

Our little forever family.

We stayed part of the time at my cousin's house in Heber. They had giant dandelions around their house. The kids loved blowing them. Here's Rich teaching Macie how to blow.

I wanted Ryan to see where he was born so we swung by the hospital for a little photo op.

We rode the Alpine slide, zipline, and coaster in Park City. SO MUCH FUN. This will probably become a tradition for us every time we visit. I'm not kidding people the Alpine coaster was probably one of the best coasters I've been on. And I've been on quite a few.

I had dinner with roommies from my sophomore year in college. We had a blast and yummy food.

This was probably one of the best trips ever to Utah. We really made it a point to do tons of fun things in addition to visiting family. We went to Lagoon, visited our friends the Chases, went shopping, went to all our old favorite restaurants, played games. It was the best. Ok, back from Utah. . .

So, we have a mulberry tree and a lot of mulberries. Our freezer is half full of them. Picking, cleaning and freezing them has consumed a lot of our time lately.

Here's what they look like. They're delicious, too. Did I mention we have thousands? Thousands. We've been giving them away but there seems to be a never ending supply.

I found these two gorging themselves on mulberries after church.

We've gone through a lot of stain remover lately.

Finally, our garden is huge. The corn is huge, the zucchini is huge, and the lettuce is huge. We love it. We've been eating veggies galore. I'd post a picture but the ones I took are now outdated and it's too dark to take any now. But maybe tomorrow. . .