Family and More Family

There are even more July pictures left to post!  I'm very slowly getting everything blogged and pushing my way through our summer pictures!

Toward the end of our big trip my cousin drove over from Mississippi for a visit and we persuaded her to come down to our house for a day so I could meet her new baby girl and so the boys could play with their cousin!

Here is sweet Millie, the world's sweetest and most calm baby!  Noah was pretty interested in her, so that's a good sign, right?!  Do I look natural holding a baby girl?!

We sat around and had a huge family lunch together.  My aunts came down and brought food, desserts and mom cooked as well.  I made some homemade ice cream and it just made for a perfect family gathering!  We really enjoy getting to spend time with family because we just don't get to do it too often.

It's fun to have an uncle to play swords with you!

All of the second cousins!  I love this picture of my 3 boys and her 2 girls!

We were fortunate to have my grandparents come up to visit.  The boys are so fortunate to have great-grandparents they can visit and play with.  We don't get to see our family often enough!

Jordan and I got in a date night to a fun sushi place with some old high school friends who are married and live in Boston now!  We realize we are getting so, so old!

All good things must come to an end and our long trip back home needed to come to an end..  We were ready to get back to our beds, our schedules, and VBS was awaiting us when we got back home!

On the road again!  3 boys, 1 white dog in my lap, massive amounts of diapers, drinks, and toys, and 12 hours ahead of us on the road.  Let's hit the road!

The drive back home is always beautiful!

We took a day to rest and recover then jumped right into VBS at our church.  John Michael loved VBS last year and he just loved it again this year.  I usually work in crafts and I enjoy seeing the kids all week.  It's always a fun and tiring week.

All in all, it was a great trip but we were definitely ready to get back home!

July in Alabama

 I'm still catching up from all of our summer activities....

Whenever we go back home to Alabama the boys always want to go to the Imagination Place.  It's  a fun little kid place with a little grocery store, bank, and a few other things to play with.  It doesn't hurt that my favorite home cookin' restaurant is right next door to it!  We usually go there to eat lunch after the boys play!

They had a fun display set up all about turtles and outdoor things.  Here, Judd and I are taking on the roll of fisherman and game warden!

More swimming...

an indoor bouncy place was fun as well on hot July days...

Matthew and I went on a date night to see Monster's University.  We did some shopping and I let him pick out an awesome t-shirt with a sports car on it.  He was in heaven!  I love to have some quiet time with my little guy.

We also took a trip to the Birmingham Zoo.  We had a great time and I was really impressed at nice everything was.  We rode the train, fed the ducks, sweated a ton, saw a butterfly garden, walked through a barn, and then went on a walk with dinosaurs in the woods!

Before we went on our dinosaur walk we stopped off at the soapy splash pad!

I'd say everyone had a great day at the zoo!

Sweet Summertime Fun!

When you're at your grandparent's house for part of the summer, you do a LOT of swimming...

and you play with hats at Meme's kitchen table....

and you have TONS of room to run and play in their backyard!

And you also pick tons of plums from Papa's tree and wash them and play with them for hours!

Summer is sweet!

A Reason to Celebrate!

Every summer we travel back to Alabama so that we can have a good, long visit with our family.  We swim, play, visit with my great-grandparents, eat lots of dinners together, and go for fun outings.  This trip back home was especially important because I knew a little secret...there was to be an engagement the very next day after we made the long drive back home!

Living out of state, we miss so much.  We miss family dinners, important family get-togethers and holidays, but I was determined not to miss this family event!  We were so excited for Judd and Jennie to have a special engagement and then get their wedding plans rolling!

I'm going to have another sister-in-law!

My grandparents drove up for the special occasion and Jennie's family the next day so that we could all sit together and celebrate over dinner!

Ray was excited about the good news too!

There's nothing like family gathering around the table!

We are so excited for the happy occasion coming up in just a few months!

A Franklin 2nd Birthday

 We had a small Franklin themed birthday party a few days ahead of Noah's 2nd birthday.  He loved "Frank" so much this summer.  It was kind of hard to find Franklin birthday supplies so I just bought what I could find...plates, a banner, cups, and cupcake toppers!

The kids swam for a bit first, then we went back inside and had cupcakes and sang to the birthday boy!

I still cannot believe "the baby" of our family is 2!  Time just flies by and never slows down once you start having kids!

We had another birthday celebration on Noah's actual birthday because we traveled back to Alabama for our annual summertime trip!  More pictures to come later!

Father's Day 2013

How lucky my boys are to have Jordan as their father!  I think of how many years I've known him and all along I've just KNOWN he would be the greatest dad one day.  These boys adore their father!  He's always ready for another round of hide and go seek with them at night and there's always a little boy wanting another book or piggy back ride from him.

I am so thankful for Jordan and all of the things that he does for our family!

I'm still playing catch up with all of our pictures from summer.  June was full of fun for our family! We played outside a lot and enjoyed a slower pace than we had known in months.  It was great!

John Michael went to gymnastics camp at the place where he takes lessons.  He went last year and wanted to go again this year.  It's just a few hours for 3 days in a row.  He loved going!  One morning after we dropped him off, I took the other 2 boys to a family fun Chick-Fil-A morning. They had fun crafts for the kids to do and we played and made art while we ate breakfast.

Noah got a haircut...

and we started going to our fun, new aquatic center that had just opened!

It is such an awesome place!  Our boys are so very lucky that they get to grow up with this in their town.

We swam at our neighborhood pool and this summer I was finally able to comfortably take all 3 of them and manage by myself!  A lot of mornings we would take our lunch and eat there and then come home for nap.  Summer really is the best, isn't it?!

We started our "homeschool Wednesdays" by doing a sight words DVD and flash cards and usually a craft activity.  Every week the boys wanted to learn about animals in the ocean!

We did some fun art and made an octopus and they made an ocean scene with sand and goldfish!  They also made starfish with corn kernels!

John Michael and I had a special date night out at the pool!  It was kind of nice to have some quiet time to just talk with my new 5 year old!

There was definitely more fun to come in our summer!

We Clean Up Nicely!

We clean up quite nicely!  We get our family picture made every fall by our fabulous photographer friend but frankly, we've never had a family picture in a studio.  Our church had directory pictures made this winter and I was so skeptical that we could get everyone to sit still and look and smile at the camera.  The boys surprised us by laughing hysterically at the funny things the photographer did!  I was so happy to see that we got a great family "posed" photograph!

This picture is a few months old, but never late than never, right?!