June, July & August 2013

The day after school was out for the summer the boys left for Colorado for cousins week. They had fun taking swimming lessons, hiking, roasting s'mores, shooting b.b. guns and just being with their cousins.

They came home the day of Kaleb's 9th birthday so we let him open his presents in Grand Junction, CO, the halfway point where we picked them up. Later that evening we had cake at Sunday dinner and unfortunately this is the only picture I have of that.

One month after Eli passed away we went to decorate his grave. Kaleb was at scouts this morning so we went back later that night so that he could see everything on the grave. Ashton picked out a stuffed sting ray and flag and Kaleb picked out the basketball for him. We sure miss him.

 June 25, 2013

In July we had family pictures taken by Jared Medley during a $50 mini session to raise money for someone who had been in a car accident. I love getting our family pictures taken but don't get them taken that often because I hate paying hundreds of dollars for it. I LOVE how they turned out!

 July 2, 2013

Ashton and his friends love to dress up in all of the old costumes and have sword fights and all sorts of "battles" as they call them.

 July 6, 2013

This is Ashton's last t-ball game of the summer. Almost every game was 100+ degrees and although we would find shade or had umbrellas for shade I always felt bad for the kids standing out in that heat. Ashton's face was always bright red.

 July 10, 2013

The best part for everyone else were the snow cones. It was a good way to keep cool.

I'm happy to say that Olivia loves watermelon just as much as I do. Although unlike me, she'll even eat the rind, she's not picky!
July 11, 2013

The boys always want to get wet and play on the trampoline or make a water-slide with a tarp and the slide from the swing-set. This time they put a pool at the bottom of the slide.

July 20, 2013

We decided (and by me and mean Matt) that we needed to re-sod our lawn. So here's a picture of the before. You can see how half of the lawn is crab grass and the other half was a weird grass that didn't do too well with all the sun we get. This is only a couple of days after mowing and you can see how much longer the crab grass gets right away so our lawn looked like a leopard pattern. So we rented a sod cutter and cut out the old lawn.
May 10, 2013

Here's the after picture! We wanted to put rocks around but couldn't find a good deal and then I saw these rocks on KSL for free. Can't beat that right. The listing was from the day before so I figured they would already be gone because most of the free items worth getting on KSL are gone quick so that Friday night we drove down to Draper just to see if they were still there. Did I mention it was 9pm. We get there and almost all of the rocks are still there. We had somewhere to be the next morning so we wanted to get the rocks before they were gone so we loaded some rocks up in the back of our van. Obviously rocks are heavy so we only dared take so many. Then we came back with both cars and loaded up some more. After the 2nd trip it was almost 11pm so I put the kids, all who were asleep already except Kaleb and put them to bed and Matt went for one more load. We didn't know how many we would need. The next morning Matt got up at 6am and got 2 more loads of rocks. I'm glad we had the rocks because I like how they look and it didn't cost us anything, except our backs and some gas! :)

We also added a sidewalk for more curb appeal to break-up the yard. Which that's another whole story because the guys who ran out of concrete the first day finally came weeks later and poured the last section but it was a different color and so we wanted them to redo it. They said they would and I figured they would because they would probably want the rest of their money but they never have come back yet. The first couple of months we kept calling them but I think we've given up. Honestly, I'll keep my money at this point and learn to live with it.

Also, the grass we chose is Bella Blue and it is slow growing, uses less water and you mow it every 3 weeks. It's been awesome, it's a darker green color and after the first week of growing it doesn't really get much longer so you can put off mowing, which I'm good at doing. Now if only the back had the same type of grass. Sorry for all the boring details.

 July 20, 2013

One evening the boys said they tried to have a photo shoot with Olivia but that she wouldn't cooperate and leave the sunglasses on so this is what they did.

 July 21, 2013

Olivia taking a bath after a messy dinner. This picture was 3 months ago but currently she loves bathtime and splashes all over the place. She's usually laughing and never wants to get out.

July 28, 2013

The beginning of August we headed up the canyon with friends to have tinfoil dinners and roast marshmallows. With young kids it's less work than camping but you still get the campfire and the kids can run around and play and get dirty.

 August 3, 2013

This is one of Olivia's Sunday morning naps after a bath. The boys always are putting their stuffed animals in her crib and she loves hugging them.

 August 25, 2013

Kaleb is now in 4th grade! He's always excited for school to start which I'm sure won't always be the case. He loves riding his bike to school and does really well in school. I'm amazed at how hard some of the math is that he brings home but he's doing great!

August 26, 2013

Olivia is such a busy body. Can't sit still and wants to get in everything. But she's cute so that makes up for it.

 August 27, 2013

We used our vouchers from the boys playing recreation soccer to go to 2 different Real games. This was the first one against Portland and we won 4-2. I don't have any pictures of the second game we went to but it was October 5th against FC Dallas and when we got the tickets we didn't realize that was the night of the Priesthood session and Ashton didn't want to go so I took Kaleb and one of his friends and they had a blast. Considering we were a man down almost the whole game we were happy with a 1-1 tie.

Olivia did really well, I wasn't sure how she would do with the noise but she didn't mind it at all.

August 30, 2013

Kaleb and Ashton hanging out. (Which that hat Kaleb's wearing from his birthday is now lost somewhere on the Mummy ride at Universal Studio's Florida.)

There's a glimpse into how our summer was. Now to September, which 15 days of the month were spent in Florida having a blast!