Goodbye Summertime

Another summer is coming to an end. Have I ever mentioned how much I love summer?

I do. Love. Lovelovelovelovelove.

I love almost everything about it. I love the long, long sunny days. I love the midsummer sunsets that I can watch leisurely from my deck after the kids are already in bed. I love walking out of an cold, over-air conditioned building and just letting the warm air hit me like a wave. I love watching our resident hummingbird, who we have named "Huey," ferociously guarding his patch of flowers from every other hummingbird (and dragonfly and honeybee) around. I love waking up in the morning to actual sun-coming-up-morning instead of pitch-black-darkness-morning. I love how the grass looks in the late afternoon when the sun is shining through and lighting up each and every blade like a little green stained glass window.

I love watching my kids play for hours in three inches of water in our inflatable pool:

I love watching Corbie go down the slide over and over and over. Every time her feet hit the ground she screeches "GIN!" (again) and runs to the stairs.

She could go down the slide all day if she could.
I love being able to play outside every day without having to worry about putting on coats or gloves or jackets or even shoes. I love sleeping with the windows open and listening to the crickets sing. I love flip flops.

I am always a little sad when summer starts coming to an end. But thankfully winter doesn't come right ter summer, and there arot of things I really love about fall. The colors. Football. Halloween. Sweaters. And do you think Arden is maybe the teeniest bit excited to go back to preschool?

Maybe just a little.

Hopefully summer will try to hang on for a few more weeks before it leaves for good.

Arden's First Soccer Game

Arden is playing soccer this year! I am officially a soccer mom now, I guess. She is on an all-girls team of 4-year old girls. Somehow, they hit the jackpot and were assigned the only PINK uniforms in the league. Hooray!

She had her first practice last week, and her coach seems like a really good guy. That is really great, since Arden doesn't really have much of a clue :).

The most important thing that happened during the first practice was the choosing of the team name. The coach mentioned that he didn't want to be "the Princesses," so his daughter, who is on the team, immediately suggested that the team be called....."the Princesses." Hmmmmm. Some other names suggested by the girls were "the Pink Princesses," the "Pretty Pink Princesses," "the Fairy Princesses," etc. The coach started to look a little desperate. One of the parents mentioned the "Cheetahs," and the coach quickly grabbed on to that one. The 4-year old girls were not impressed, however, and were still stuck in princess-land. Arden likes cheetahs, and suggested the "Pink Cheetahs." The girls still weren't too thrilled, but at least "pink" was in the name. A compromise was reached.

Gooooo PINK CHEETAHS!

Here is Arden right before her first game:

Okay, she is seriously cute. She totally looks the part. Gooooo Arden!

I seriously had no idea what to expect. Below is a picture of Arden in action:
Arden is at the very back of the picture. The soccer ball is somewhere in the front of the picture. If I took a picture every second during the soccer game, about 90% of the pictures would look something like this :) Arden really liked running around next to her pink friends, but got a little uncomfortable if the ball came too close to her. She pretty much tried to stay out of the way of the ball as much as possible. But at least she was out on the field, and she was not crying. I call it a success.

Her coach let her do a couple of the goal kicks, which made her a little more comfortable and she actually kicked the ball a few times after that! Yaaaaay Arden! I am not actually sure which team won the game, but it seemed pretty even. Does it count when you score on the other team's goal? What about the goal that Dax scored? (At least when Dax scored his breakaway goal is was during a quarter break and not during the actual game.)

Here was Arden's favorite part of the game: The post-game TREATS!!!

I am sure that she will catch on a little more every game. She really had a good time and is already looking forward to her next practice.

More Summertime Adventures

When Arden was a baby/toddler, a bunch of girls in the neighborhood would take our kids to a different fun place every week during the summertime. Then last year and this year we simplified and just go to a different local park each week instead. It has been great since my kids would go to the park every day if they could. Even Cora can get herself up stairs and down the smaller slides without any help. And it is a lot easier for the moms to chat at the park! But I missed going to some of the places we used to go, so I took the kids to a couple of the favorites myself.
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First up was Wheeler Farm. It is fun to go to the farm because it is free, and the kids think it is almost as good as the zoo. We don't see very many cows or sheep around our house, so they are almost exotic animals. But the first thing we have to do is pretend we are driving the tractors like real farmers do:

We saw bunnies, sheep, cows, horses, pigs, goats, and lots of chickens. We also fed the ducks and geese. Dax was a little afraid of the cows, and even though they were behind a fence, he liked to keep his distance. But he wasn't afraid of the baby cows, he tried to climb up into this little guy's stall:

The kids were a little disappointed that the horses were far away on the other side of their pasture, but I got them some 25 cent otter pops and they quickly forgot their sorrows.

Our next adventure was the Dinosaur Park in Ogden. They have a pretty cool inside museum with a lot of dinosaur skeletons:

Dax was a little afraid of the skeletons, especially because they had some face dinosaur roaring sounds playing over the sound system. Here is Dax, huddled in a corner, hiding from the dinosaur bones: Poor little guy! He quickly figured out that nothing was moving and was soon running all over the place like his usual 2-year-old self. Outside there are dozens and dozens of life-size dinosaur statues, but Arden liked these cut-outs most of all:

Ride em, dinogirl! Arden did like this particular group of dinosaurs. She said, "Look Mom! That mommy dinosaur is giving those baby ones a ride!"

Umm....hmmmmm. A ride. Yeah. How nice.

Arden kept asking where the "park" was since we were at the "Dinosaur Park," and luckily they do have a playground. They have a few dinosaurs that the kids can climb on, some swings and some slides and a regular playground. Here are the kids riding on a friendly baby dinosaur:

Finally, last weekend we made our annual trip to the Weber County Fair for the demolition derby. We brought all the kids to show them the animals and other fair stuff before the derby started. Dax's favorite was the sheep. He just had to touch them all. I think he petted about 100 sheep that day:

Cora's favorite were the cows. I had to stop her from climbing up next to the cows quite a few times:

After we looked at the animals and got some delicious and very unhealthy fair food (spiral fries anyone???) we took the kids over to see the wild animal show. They had a monkey, a cougar, and regular tiger and a young white tiger among others. The kids really liked the show, but we were staring right into the sun so I have no pictures. Daxton especially liked the tigers, and roared a lot during the show. He roars all the time. Sometimes he is a dinosaur, sometimes a lion, sometimes a tiger. He roars just for fun. He roars if he can't get what he wants. He roars at other kids if they won't give him the toy they have. He roars at the neighbor boy to establish his territory. Today he roared so loud at one of his little friends that he made them cry (sorry Luke!). Anyway....

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My parents took the little kids home and the rest of us met up with my cousins for the demolition derby! I always say that going to the fair is like visiting another country, and the derby is definitely part of that. It is just so far outside our every day life, but so much fun to do once a year. We had a great time, although the end of the derby was absolute chaos. (http://connect2utah.com/news-story/?nxd_id=104245... my cousin's boyfriend is the one who shot the footage and did the interview!)

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This summer has flown by so fast!

The Joy of Popsicles

What could be better on a sunny summer day than a popsicle? Look at the happiness on these kids' faces:

Oh wait....that isn't just happiness on Dax and Corbie's faces...that is happiness and MESS. And the happiness and mess doesn't stop on their faces. It is down their chins, on their hands, necks, shirts, pants, and it is dripping down their arms:

Green teeth anyone?

Corbie liked to show me her tongue after she saw the other kids doing it:

Why do they put SO MUCH food coloring in these popsicles? Are they trying to turn my baby into a Smurf???? This is Cora's hand AFTER we washed it with soap and water:
It is hours later now and Corbie is in bed. The blue color on her hands has faded, but she is still distinctly Smurfy. Maybe for Halloween I could just rub a bunch of blue popsicles on Cora and she could be Smurf-ette!

Beach Babies Strike Again

July was flying by me, and I started to feel like summer was passing me by too quickly! I still had a ton of stuff on my summer "must-do" list. One of the things that was at the top of my list was a trip to Bear Lake, so a couple of weeks ago we packed up the kids and the wave runners and headed up.

My dad's family has had a place up at Bear Lake my whole life. We used to go up all the time when I was a kid, and I remember thinking that it took FOREVER to get to Bear Lake. I thought our kids might be more patient since we have a TV in our car to distract them. WRONG. We had to take a nice long stop in Logan to let them run around for a while.

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We finished the rest of the drive and arrived at Bear Lake around the usual bedtime. Of course we had to get settled in, play with Grandma and Grandpa and Amanda and Matt (my sister and bro-in-law). The kids were so excited that it was around 11 p.m. before they were all finally asleep. Most of the problem was that they (especially Dax) just get way too excited when they get to sleep in the same room as someone else. We tried to put Dax and Arden in a bed and Cora in the pack-n-play in the same room. Arden did a good job of trying to go to sleep, but Dax kept climbing down into the pack-n-play to "Play" with Cora. So we had to send him "Pack" ing to another room until he FINALLY fell asleep, then I relocated his limp drooling sleeping self to a sleeping bag on the floor by the pack-n-play. Silly boy.

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The "adults" went to bed around midnight, and Preston and I got the old sleeper sofa. Something about this sofa made it impossible for Preston to sleep any other way than on his back, and when Preston sleeps on his back....he snores. A lot. So I kick him and tell him to roll over. He obediently rolls over. Then about 2 minutes later her rolls back over on to his back and immediately starts snoring. Repeat. After a few dozen cycles of this, I give up and go to sleep by the kids in the other room. I moved Arden over and climbed into bed, which worked great for about an hour. Then Dax woke up and discovered he was on the floor. No good, he wanted to get in the bed. All the commotion woke up Cora. I relocated Dax to the bed, calmed down Cora, and decided to try the floor myself. After Dax settled down and went back to sleep, he soon started having a bad dream and began whining in his sleep. This woke up Cora again, and she couldn't settle down and kept waking up Dax. Around 5 a.m. I went back to the sleeper sofa with Cora so that at least Arden and Dax could get some sleep. Cora fell asleep between Preston and me. Hooray! Then Preston started snoring again :)

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I was worried that the kids would be too tired to have any fun at the beach, but they did great! They were like energizer bunnies ALL DAY LONG. Cora and Dax usually nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but neither of them even thought about it at the beach! They were having too much fun.

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The level of the lake water is high this year, and there was only a thin stretch of beach by Sweetwater. We got there early and got a good spot, but it got pretty crowded by the afternoon. But everyone was having a good time.

Arden really likes to ride the wave runners, and this year she really liked to go FAST!

Preston even took Daxton out for a ride and he seemed to have fun. I had Arden on the other wave runner, and he kept telling Preston, "Chase Mom! Chase Mom!" However, one ride seemed to be enough for him. Every time we asked him if he wanted to go out again, he said no. :) (I didn't know I was only going to get one chance, so I didn't get any pictures of Dax on the wave runners. I only took like 5 pictures the whole day (I am a slacker, sorry) Next time I will do better!) I had to talk Preston out of taking Cora out on the wave runners. Seriously, she is 15 months old!! Does it sound like a good idea to you? Dads.

Dax had a great time playing in the water and the sand and eating the plentiful snacks that were available. We brought his "blankie" to the beach in case he wanted to take a nap. It got juuust a little dirty.

I think I asked him "Where is your smile?" so he had to point to it for me. My poor little albino son got a little bit sunburned on his arms despite the sunscreen. I guess that is why the rest of him is covered. Preston got burned worse and is peeling as we speak.

Cora was running around like crazy all day. Playing with Grandma, splashing in the water, running back and forth, looking at birds and dogs, eating snacks and seashells. Here she is taking a break on Grandma's lap. She talks all day, and in this picture she is saying "HI!" (notice her little hand waving):So, cute! The weather was perfect, and us "grown-ups" had fun taking turns with the wave runners, relaxing (kind of) in the sun or the shade and playing with the kids. Arden liked to make Grandpa pull her around the shallow part of the lake on the wave runner, so she could pretend she was driving it all by herself:After playing all day we finally decided to pack it up around 5 p.m. It took us a while to haul all of our stuff to the cars. We finally strapped the kids in the car for the ride back to the boat ramp, and Dax and Cora were dead asleep before we made it up to the road.

Hopefully we can make at least one more trip before the summer ends!