Cougar Crawl

The kids' elementary school did a fundraiser called the Cougar Crawl where the kids got sponsors and then tried to see how many laps they could make on a track spray painted on the grass. We did it last year and it's been fun now to have these little traditions that come up every year that the kids like doing.  

Jonah waiting for the kindergarten-first graders to start.

Jonah and Tyrel 

(Do you like Ty's pink bunny that he was temporarily obsessed with?)

Crossing the finish line

Mikelle with friends

Tyrel running

Jonah running

 It's hard work to run that many laps!

 Mikelle waiting for the 2-3 graders to start

 Mikelle running

Finishing up with some pizza and snow cones!

Kenzlee 8 months old

So Kenzlee is a crawling pro now!  She is pretty fast and she is pulling herself up to standing position on everything now.  She is starting to kind of get on a schedule that goes along with the kids' school schedules, but I have to wake her up to leave at least once, usually twice a day to go pick up kids.  I'm trying to get her on a good eating schedule too, and have her eat more 'people' food.  She loves baby food, especially the veggies (who is this kid!), her favorite is squash but she still loves the sweet potatoes and peas.  She eats her fruits too though, and is becoming very interested in 'our' food.  I haven't met a food yet that she doesn't like.  Last night we had butternut squash pumpkin pasta and she loved it.

She is a cuddly little girl and loves to crawl around and explore.  She especially loves going downstairs in the play room, or in Ty's room.  She is starting to grab the kids' toys when the are playing with them. The other day Ty and Jonah were building houses out of lincoln logs and she kept going over and tipping over their houses, so they put her under the computer desk and tucked the chair in so she was trapped and couldn't get their houses anymore.  She didn't like it, but Matt and I had a hard time not smiling about it.  She loves her Grandma and her and Brinley get very jealous whenever the other one is being held.

Her two front teeth are coming in (we've had A LOT of sleepless nights) and I think they'll be in within a month. I've been trying to teach her a couple things in sign language, but they don't seem to be sticking so we will see.

It was very hard to get her attention with this little mossy spot in the sidewalk.

She loved playing on Ollie and Brinley's horse.

We pulled out the toy table and she loves playing with it

Mikelle was trying to read her a story but she kept grabbing the pages.

Rain Storm

So just a couple hours before this huge rain/thunder/lightning storm came in, we were doing this:

And this, the kids made hand and feet prints all over the road with chalk.

I even snapped a couple pictures of our beautiful street.

Then the rains came down and the floods came up!

(Luckily our house didn't flood but several of our neighbors had flooded basements.)

It was a pretty awesome storm and it definitely made all the kids think about and be more grateful that we had a nice, warm, safe house to go into.  Half way through the storm we looked out the window and noticed we lost a tree.  The kids were actually quite upset about this, it was kind of cute.  Birds would play in this tree all the time and we had hung our homemade bird feeders in it. 

Good bye tree!

Girls Trip to Midway

I didn't take a lot of pictures of our girls trip, but we did have a lot of fun.  We got Grandma Buttercup to join us and we stayed in a resort hotel in Midway.  They were having Swiss Days that weekend (it's a huge craft fair type thing), so we mostly shopped, ate and swam in the pool.  We had to take the two babies but it was nice to get away and take a break for awhile, and my Dad and Aaron even came up for several hours to watch the babies so we all could get aways without any kids for awhile.

The babies loved looking at their reflections in the mirror.

We stayed at the Zermatt Resort and had two rooms that connected to each other.  It was almost like an apartment.  We had a stocked kitchen and living room and bedrooms.  Lots of fun!