Dear B, C, and G....

Dearest Children,

Thank you for a wonderful summer. I will miss your sleepy faces at the breakfast table at 9:30 every morning. I will miss having you home for lunch, having the house filled with your friends, and staying up late every night. I will miss our popsicle snack each afternoon and the popsicle drips on the kitchen floor. I will mostly just miss you---having you here and hanging out with you each day. I will miss your whining about jobs, your tattling and fighting. I will miss nagging you to get your jobs done! I will miss telling you 78 times each day to CLOSE THE DOOR WE ARE NOT AIR CONDITIONING THE ENTIRE GALAXY and other sundry phrases that you, in turn, will use with you children. I will miss dousing you in sunscreen, driving to swim lessons, packing you for scout camp, and spending 160 hours with you on vacation. I will miss begging you to be in photos and nagging you to take a shower at least once a week. Even though you make me Crazy with a capitol C in so many ways and I feel like the most inadequate person in the entire air-conditioned galaxy to be your parent, you mean the world to me and if I could have picked any 4 children out there I would have chosen you, my 4 popsicle-dripping, sibling-fighting, problem-causing mess-making children that somehow I was lucky enough to get in the first place.

Have a great school year. I know you will.

Love,
Mom

7-4-1

7th

1st, 4th

3rd, 6th

Kindergarten

1st, 4th

Kindergarten

AF Canyon

No summer is complete without a cookout in the canyon, or as the kids call it, "Mom bribing us with hot dogs and marshmallows JUST so she can take pictures." Me? Would I do that?

(Evidently my fingers were too sticky from the giant marshmallows we roasted to take any pictures of said marshmallows.)

Painted Faces

We spent a lot of our summer painting faces. And by "we" I mean Cassidy and her adorable friends spent a lot of time rounding up poor neighborhood victims or sometimes poor brothers and subjecting them to their artistic skills.  

There was also a very yummy (and very lucrative) bake sale.

There were some fun backyard BBQs and fun craft projects.

And there were LOTS of blurry pictures that were almost very cute.

Splash

We spent a lot of our summer getting wet. We were delighted to discover the new reservoir in Pleasant Grove. The water is one degree warmer than the arctic ocean but hey, there was sand and beautiful scenery and if you closed your eyes for just a moment you could (almost) picture yourself at the beach:

Bonus! There was mud.

A few more splashes:

(We spent a lot of our summer eating popsicles, too.)

Wild Animal Park

We spent one day in SD at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, formerly known as the Wild Animal Park. This place is spread over like 10,000 acres and we walked through most if it.

The children took quite a few pictures of the animals.

I took pictures of some of my favorite animals.

The carousel was a big hit, and we loved having Aunt Melissa join us for the day.

Cabrillo

On the last day of our trip, Grandpa Joe and Aunt Melissa joined us, and we spent a beautiful day at Cabrillo Beach and La Jolla.

The views at Cabrillo are amazing. We loved finding shells and sea creatures, including this giant lobster shell:

Sam would have been content for HOURS to just throw rocks into the water (sorry, fish).

After lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, we headed north to La Jolla, an upscale beach town that is home to UCSD and the LDS temple. Let's just say that parallel parking our Suburban there was a fun experience! But the beaches and coves made it totally worth it.

Two words: SELF PORTRAIT! Seriously, you should be thanking me that I refrained from posting ALL the pictures the kids took. But if I had, here would be some of my post titles:

The pigeon, the squirrel, and some dirt.

Bushes and their leaves

Up a nostril and then some

Uninteresting strangers in a crowd

Parking lots and the cars who inhabit them