Whatever Happened to July?

I've really enjoyed being busy for a change this past month. Although, we have done a lot of just hanging out at home too. This next picture cracks me up. Yep those are light sabers that Luke attached to his underwear! I love that little tan line too! This picture really represents what it means to be a 3-year-old boy during summertime.

Me and the little boys got to spend almost a whole week at my parent's house while Ty had some job training out of town. All three of us were very spoiled!

My dad made these awesome croissants from scratch, and I just had to take a picture...

... but my mom thought it was kind of silly just to take a picture of a croissant like that. "You need someone to hold it. Like this!" she said. Haha! I love my mom. Which picture do you think turned out better?!

We did lots of fun things like going to the park, feeding the ducks, and eating junk food. We even went to Wal-Mart twice with a little stack of quarters for Luke to put into the machines. That's where we got the mustache! My dad even got this old battery powered jeep for free and fixed it up for the kids. The smile Luke had on his face when he was driving it for the first time was priceless! In case you didn't know, my parents have 4 Llamas, 2 dogs, and a bunch of chickens which also provided us with constant entertainment. A special thanks to my sister Necia for coming down and spending the week with us. She's the one who took that awesome picture of me with my boys! Thanks!

After a week at Grandma and Grandpa's the kids were quite worn out. That made for a nice mostly quiet drive home for me! Hooray!

Every year the Stakes in the Gila Valley put on an awesome 24th of July celebration. This year our Primary was in charge of our wards float for the parade. Since I was riding on the float, I decided to bring Luke along even though he's only in Nursery still. He loved it! He waved at everyone very enthusiastically and kept on yelling out "Hello kids! How are you?" to all the kids in the crowd! All the older kids on the float though he was hilarious. It was raining like crazy, but the parade went on. Check out the before on the left and the after pic on the bottom right.

We skipped the festivities because it was raining so hard, and spent time with Ty's family instead. We did come back for the fireworks though. Every year I am always amazed with how close the authorities here let us get to the fireworks. I think almost every year for the 4th or 24th some one I'm with almost always gets hit with some firework remnant falling from the sky. Anyways I had a lot of fun taking pictures of these fireworks. These aren't your usually pictures of fireworks. You can try it with any camera. Just put your camera on a setting where the flash can't fire, and just wiggle the camera like crazy while you take the picture. I kind of liked how these turned out.

This is what Luke looked like while we watched the fireworks.

Just to end off this ridiculously long post, the craziest thing happened the other day. After we had eaten dinner, and I hadn't cleared off the table yet, Grady climbed up into Luke's seat and started eating all of Luke's left-over spaghetti. That is not the crazy part, we're still getting there. Of course, I think it's too cute, so I whip out my camera for a picture. Okay this is the crazy part, when I put the camera to my face to take the picture he all of a sudden puts the hugest smile on his face and says "Cheese!". Well it was at least something that sounded a lot like "cheese". This kid is only 13 months old, and has a vocabulary of only like 5-10 words, and yet he looks at the camera and says "Cheese!" and smiles! Crazy! I've never taught Luke to say "cheese", so I'm really not sure where he learned this from. I've tried it again this past week, and to my surprise he did it again. I think I may have found my perfect baby model! Too funny!