A day at the park with friends

I met up with my friend Jessica at our favorite park here in town, America the Beautiful, so that our kids could play and cool off in the fountain. We have been friends since we were in 5th grade so not only did we basically watch each other grow up but we have watched our children grow up. Jessica has 5 children of her own plus my 4 kids so it makes it a little bit of a challenge to try to coordinate our schedules and get the kids together to play. But we were able to do it on Tuesday afternoon. And boy was it a scorcher! Phew I am done with this heat. It has been in the 90's all week long here which seems too hot for me!

Emma on the big girl swing

Allorah hanging out in her stroller....she doesn't like cold water so she wouldn't play in the fountain

Gabby, Zander and Christian playing in the water

Zander, Kayla, Emma, Christian and Eli playing in the water....not really sure why it is fun because they basically just run around and around the fountain kicking the water...guess you gotta be a kid to appreciate it!

Emma followed Zander every where he went! Made it nice to keep track of her since I just had to look for him and she would be right there!

Ready or Not?!

So as I said last night, I was going to work on potty training Emma this whole week. Well that plan came to a screeching halt today. She had a few accidents and either told me after the fact, or went to her potty after the fact. And she would get a bit stressed out every time I asked her if she needed to use the potty. So with those 2 things alone, I feel like she must not be as ready as I had hoped. So we will wait for a while longer before trying it again. In the meantime, it is still 2 sets of diapers for us! :)

Almost Forgot

I decided that I would take this whole next week to work on potty training Emma. We are going to stay home all day and let her run around without a diaper and see how it goes. Since I knew this was going to be happening, I have been pumping Emma up on being a big girl and using her big girl potty. So for the last several days, I have been finding a diaper on a floor and an Emma "missing". She will take it off and go sit on her potty. Friday she actually went potty in it! You can tell because it is a princess potty and it makes noises when it is wet. I am hoping this is a good sign of how it is going to go this week. So everyone, wish us luck! And I will keep you posted on how she is doing!

Cool Water

I learned about a new park here in town last summer but we never made it down that way. So I figured since I had most of the summer off of work, I would take the kids down there. We finally made it today and the kids loved the place! They have a spray park for the kids to run around and play in the water. The only bad thing is that there really isn't much shade for us parents to sit in around the area which wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for having Hailey and not wanting to roast her! Even Emma enjoyed playing in the water despite the fact that the girl was turning purple from being so cold! She did finally decide to get out and stand by me but still wouldn't let me wrap her towel around her. Eli found these giant water gun things to play with and that was pretty much what he did the entire time. Kayla got to follow Emma all over the place and even tried to knock herself out from not ducking when going through this rainbow thing! We will definitely be going back at the kids' request!

They had to check it out before they could really get in there and play according to Kayla

Trying it out

That rainbow thing in the background is what Kayla hit her head on....

And here is what Hailey got to do....

See her purple face! This was on our way out when she finally let me wrap her up

Lazy or Clever

Kayla was helping me this afternoon by washing bottles (we don't have a dishwasher) and when I went into the kitchen to get a bottle this is what I found......
Both of the brushes have suction cups so she had stuck them to the side of the sink closest to her and she would just scrub, scrub and was done! She set up this little demo for us.

Big Sis/Little Sis

My friend Valerie found these adorable shirts for Emma and Hailey when I was pregnant and I couldn't wait to put the girls in them! Too bad they don't make them big enough for Kayla to wear! It was near impossible to find something that a newborn and a toddler could wear that would match. I could get kind of close but that was it. Nothing really cute or special either. But the problem was solved! And you can't really tell in the picture but the pigtails on the girl are actual pieces of string that stick out of the shirt like real hair. OK that is one of those you would have to see it for it to make sense but it is cute!

Happy Birthday Joey!

Friday was my nephew Joey's 3rd birthday and my step-sister had his party on Saturday at Nana and Grandpa's house. The kids had fun just playing and checking out the puppies. It was too chilly to go swimming that day. Then he opened presents and had cake. Here are a few pictures from the party.

Joey starting to open presents. Emma loves her cousin Joey!

Joey loves his baseball gloves! That is all he wanted to play with the rest of the day!

More presents....

Grandpa was a little jealous of Joey's laptop......

Cake time! He didn't want to wait for us to finish singing so he went ahead and blew out his candles!

Puppies

As if it wasn't exciting enough that Nana and Grandpa got to watch their 11th grand baby (#12 is due sometime in Jan I think) come into this world late last month. They got to welcome 4 grand puppies into the world thanks to their dog Sheba. They are part Sheltie part Pomeranian and are too cute. Of course Grandpa decided he wanted to keep one and my sister is going to fly one to NY so there will be 2 puppies up for grabs for any takers come mid Sept! :)

Here is the proud mama with her puppies (she is part sheltie part pom and dad is full sheltie)

This is Duffy (grandpa's dog) and Shiloh (Lorie's dog)These are the two that will need homes. My favorite is the light brown one.
Emma kissing Duffy

The Big Read

Nope, this isn't about my kids or even JR and I but I love books and found this fascinating. I also know most of my friends love books too and would like to see a list like this!

My friend Crystal aka Revhipchick posted about something called 'The Big Read', from the NEA, designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They came up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I will highlight the ones I've read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I read the first book of the series but wasn't really interested in the rest
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - not in full but many parts of it
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens3
3 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So there you have it! I have only read 15 of these! I own several of them that I would like to eventually read. Guess I should get on that! I hope to see this list on some of my other blogger's pages!

Zoo trip!

My sister and brother-in-law wanted to go the zoo and decided to not only treat us to that trip but also purchased a membership for us so we can go all we want for the next year. So the kids and I will have something to do this summer for sure! We have the best zoo in my opinion compared to other zoo's that I have been to in other cities or states. They have done a ton of work there over the last 7 yrs or so and it is turning out to be even better!

Anyways, we had a good time despite the heat and managed to walk almost the entire zoo. And while that might not sound like a big deal, you have to know that our zoo is on a mountain so it is all hills. So much so that they have put in "Sky High Adventure" which is a ski lift that goes from the bottom to the top of the zoo.

The sad part of all of this....my camera broke after taking 1 picture. I'm not sure what is wrong with it and I am hoping and praying that it will be an easy fix. Fortunately I have an old camera that I can use but obviously didn't have it there with me! So sorry that I don't have any pictures to share with you!

Happy Birthday Lorie!

We got to celebrate Lorie's birthday with her this year since she was in town. Her birthday is July 5th but we did cake on the 4th since we were all together. Here are a few pictures from the evening.

Emma being very shy of Grandpa Patty (my father)

A good portion of the group (several people missing like my mom and step-dad and my brother-in-law)

Lorie dishing out her own cake! Geez we are mean!

Happy 4th of July

My sister, brother-in-law and brother were all in town over the last week so we celebrated the 4th at my moms house. We had a BBQ and then went down to their neighbors house to light off some fireworks. JR and Hailey stayed in my moms house because of the noise and excessive amount of sulfur in the air! Emma was either up on the front porch or in Aunt Lorie's arms most of the time because of the noise. JR and I ended up taking the 2 little girls home to go to bed and let the big kids stay with Nana and come home after all the fireworks. It was a little surreal for me to wait until after 11 for my kids to come home! :) Here are a couple of pictures.

Nothing goes together better than fireworks and beer right?!

The kids with their sparklers

Front view of the kids with their sparklers....the girl in the white shirt is the granddaughter of the people who's house we were at