It's Been A While..But I'll Just Do This Anyway!

So I'm a loser...I was going to blog all summer, but never got around to it and summer is pretty much over once August hits...I'd like to do a quick summer highlight...so I'm going to post this one and some of my favorite summer ones and move on...Sadly these are Easter pictures and then it moves to end of the school year pictures...
We had quite the hunts. Sonnet really enjoyed her hunts. Peyton and Brock also had a lot of fun hunting. It was nice to see Sas leading the charge again...I think that bunny is coming back out of retirement. There were three hunts...a little kid hunt, a teenager hunt, and an adult hunt...which was my personal favorite...and which Pam and Ryan did not win everything in this year (Jake and Nancy did!)

These were Easter outfits this year! Cute, cute, cute...I had a heyday at the JC Penney's store. They have the cutest dresses and mark them down so I was buying all kinds of cute dresses like this for only 15.00 dollars...

This is Peyton finding his basket...we hid it harder than we ever have before...so he had to try pretty hard to find it!

Sonnet loved finding her basket and made short work of the candy!

Peyton's school did dress up days at the end of the year and he is fun...he dressed up every day. These were my two favorites....

Backwards day Crazy-Blue and White day! He looks awesome huh!

Peyton also had a dance recital to end the year. It was kind of bittersweet because Patty was retiring. We will miss her.

This is all of her clogging students. You can see Peyton on the front...

This is Peyton with his 1st grade teacher. He danced at her retirement party. We are sad she is leaving. She did amazing things with Peyton. He loved going to school and he learned so much from her. She made him feel very special!

We did a science day for the 1st grade students here. We started last year in kindergarten and then year we did it again. I think they really liked it. It is fun to see how creative these little kids are.

They are building styrofoam towers here.

Finally I have some pics of memorial day. This was by far my favorite arrangement. We had to do this solo though because my mom and dad were gone...so Pam took charge and we did all the graves we normally go to...This one was for my grandma.

These were all of the ones on her grave. Sonnet liked the pretty flowers.

This is Andy and Peyton decorating his mother's grave. Still very hard and we still miss her tons. What a wonderful lady.

Okay, so this was started June 1st and it is now August 2nd. This summer has been one big party, but I'm going to be doing a big long post (or maybe a few small ones to catch up and then I promise to do better! :-) )

Love is in the Sky, Love Shacks, Love Cookies, Love Valentine's Day Weekend!

I love Valentine's Day and this year we did a whole weekend of celebration for it. We tried some new things and did some fun traditional things. All in all we felt the LOVE!
Andy started it out by being terribly creative and romantic on Friday night. He planned the whole date and I didn't have any idea what was going to happen. But we ended up going to a variety of place. His theme for the night was "For the Love" and at each place before we went in or did what we were supposed to do, he had written a poem that he read to me. Yes, he is pretty amazing. Each place was some place that was significant in our marriage and yes his poem are pretty amazing. I told him he can be chief poet laurete at our house now! I resign! I sure love that man...
Then Saturday I went to the cutest boutique/home sale. Paisley Pear Boutique is so cool. If you get the chance you need to find out where they are having a show. It is great! They have a little bit of everything and their prices are great. The cute little head wrap that you see here is one of my many purchases.
This was mother nature's Valentine's day gift the night we did our love shacks. How can you not be appreciative of all of the beauty we have around us. I love taking pictures out our backyard and seeing the different amazing sunsets. Also on Saturday we did love shacks. This was a new tradition and I've decided that I love it. Chirstmas was just too busy and is always too busy. I had leftover gingerbread kits that we just didn't get to. We just never found the time. So this year, we did them on Valentine's Day. We bought some Valentine's cand for the kids and sorted all of the red or pink or purple out from the kit and we made our love shacks. We did this while listening to the B52's sing the love shack...it as quite festive and fun.

Andy helped Sonnet and Peyton had his own ideas...

Peyton had a cute idea and then got bored as you can see, however he said on the other side there was a fire coming out of the roof. I asked him if it was my bedroom..he obviously didn't get the joke or think it was funny.

Sonnet definitely had the most colorful and cute...but she had some good help. He knows all about making a great love shack! (wink, wink).

Then it was onto sugar cookie making. I sure do know now why we only do this once a year. It is very time consuming. This year Peyton wanted some chocolate sugar cookies so we had a lot of cookies this year. I don't know if they are worth it, but they sure are good once you get done. I think we started at 3:00 p.m. and ended at about 9:00 p.m. But I decided to do different colors this year rather than doing just pink. Peyton, of course, had to do moose and cowboy hats...lips and hearts were not his style.

The green moose and purple hats.

Licking frosting is Sonnet's favorite job! Here are here cookies.

The decorating crew ...you can see the big hearts were for Peyton's class for his Valentine's Day party. I remember as a kid when Sharon Park did the big huge hearts...They were one of my favorite memories. I had to do them for my kid...I hope they will remember them...even if they don't eat them.

These were Sonnet's finished cookies...

These were some of the finished versions of all of the cookies we made...there were a lot!!!!

On the actual day of Valentine's, I woke up pretty early to get ready for school. As I was in my bathrobe with really wet hair, I saw the sunrise. I couldn't resist taking pictures. I went out on my porch in the above mentioned attire and I took these pictures. It was like the sun was saying Happy Valentine's Day.

Then that evening we had Valentine's hunts and received some small Valentine's tokens. Andy and I exchange the same gift every year...he writes a continuing story and write poems for him. We are amassing quite a collection of each. It is one of our favorite things. This year we got the kids pillow pets and Peyton got a big huge Hershey kiss (he loves chocolate) and Sonnet got some great new spring clothes! (I know kind of boring, but what girl doesn't love new clothes!)

Got caught eating his chocolate.

She loved the ladybug...

I Strongly Dislike January...But the 14th (and 13th) is great!

These three pictures were taken on a day that we had a cold day. It was on those days that I decided I really do not like January. It is very cold, dark, and depressing even though we had two cold days (which were very nice). Another shot of the nasty cold...We also had a nice surprise one day in cold January...our drains started to burble. You kind of get sick feeling when your house starts making the sounds your stomach makes before it blows. We knew something wasn't right. We didn't know if it was pipes or a backup...it just ends up we had too much poop (and other stuff for that matter). Apparently when you live in a house and aren't on a city sewer system that you need to get it pumped regularly. So of course my awesome dad knew some dude who would come and do it for us. He pumped 2 loads of "stuff" out of our sewer tank...let's just say yuck and leave it at that...However I did reflect upon the fact that of course this happened in the middle of January and of course our sewer was buried under about 3 feet of snow...why does it always happen that way? Murphy's law or something like that! You can see all of the snow that had to be pushed...for us to access the sewer. I hope it didn't kill my strawberries or my rhubarb! On to better things. Kaysha's birthday is a day before Peyton's birthday and we all met at blast off and had a blast. See if you can see a head in that! We had a fun time running around, playing with cousins,talking with each other, letting the kids burn up some pent up energy, and trying to beat mom in skyball. She is amazing! It's too bad that isn't a sport...I think she would be rich!
Sonnet and Peyton both loved the ball pit and running around in the little tubes.
It was really cool because we went on a Thursday night and no one was there...we basically had the run of the place. That was kind of cool because you didn't really have to worry where they were because we were the only ones in there. Peyton loved the rock walls and we were amazed at how quickly he could scale them. He went up and down about 10 times and tried all three levels. It was kind of funny though, because he was so light he kept coming down very slow once he got to the top! That made us laugh!

Sonnet is also a strong little thing. We are amazed with her arm strength. She held on the whole time down in this ring ride. She did it about 10 times too!

Dad was not to be outdone and he did a spider dance game! He was pretty good!

We then went back to Angie's and had pizza and cake with Kaysha...this was the best picture I could get of the birthday girl. She was flitting around all night and very excited about all of it! The next day was Peyton's birthday. He had to go to school. We took 1/2 of the day off and had his little party at school that day. Sonnet got to come over and we did a Darth Vader pinata that you just pull strings out of. He had a cute little class and they all got to pull out a string before Peyton found the magic one that made all of the candy fall out.

Then after school he finally to to open his presents. Angie always has these big fill-up balloons at her kids birthdays and Peyton has just loved them. We finally got him some...the only problem is that they are still full and still floating around my house...more than a month later! I guess I could just pop them..but he loves to look at them and play with them.

He is getting to an age where he actually slows a down a little and will read the cards because he can read now. But you can see the utter chaos he can make in about 30 seconds! He is at such a cute age.

After Christmas this year, we didn't really have anything to get him, so we just got him fun stuff that we hadn't really thought of. He did get lots of legos because he is really into them. I'm not sure what I think about them. There are tons of little parts. He builds it once and then I just have little parts all over my house...hmmm?

This was what Peyton thought he had to wear to his party...it was a Star Wars themed party again...we cracked up about this one. Andy says he looks like some character from a bad 80's movie (I can't remember which one!)

This was what the scene looked like before everyone arrived.

Once everyone got there, they had to put on Darth Vader masks instead of party hats. That made us laugh. See if you can guess who is who! We had a great night!

His request of Lasagna but he doesn't like hamburger so I did a chicken nugget lasagna..he seemed to like it as did Austin. Then we has Snicker's salad, veggies with ranch, apples with caramel apple dip and bottled root beer. Pop is getting in his birthday spankings...He needs them!

These are the styling "Top Gun" glasses that aunt Pam got him. He thought he was one cool dude in them.

The next picture shows him in his new cowboy boots...(his mom doesn't know what to think of them...but he loves them!). It also shows on his face the pure excitement of this gift that I think Grans and Pop gave him....a UFO that flies. It was the hit of the night. We were all flying it all over and had quite the laughs.

This is Peyton about to blow out candles on the Death Star (at least my feeble attempt with Andy's help in decorating!) We sure love this little boy and are so glad he came to our home. We can't believe he is 7 and yet with each passing year he just gets better and better. More smart, more cute, more creative, more witty, more fun, more challenging (but in a good way), more excited about life. I wish for him a life of MORE great experiences.
Not too bad of an attempt at the Death Star...but kind of a depressing cake! ha!

I should have said the 26th also. Little Sonnet has now been in our home for over a year. We can't believe this little girl has been with us so short of a time and it seems like she has always been here. She is a bright light in our lives and adds such a wonderful spirit and love to our home. What a sweet, cute, loving little girl. She just blesses our lives. Pray for the lawyers to get things figured out so we can get this all settled...it is taking FOREVER! But I know that good things come to those who are patient! :-) However, I do know now why they have all those lawyer jokes! Last year about three days after she came to us...Can you see any differences?