Fourth of July

The Fourth of July was a big day for us.  We started out the morning by going to our Ward's 4th of July pancake breakfast which was super fun.  After that we made our way to Aaron's to watch the parade with his family.  After then we all went back to his parents house to hang out, play games, and have a fun barbecue.  The cousins had so much fun playing together and we had fun with everyone being their for the get together.  The day before that we also had gotten together to take some family pictures.

Here's some pictures of all the cousins and a water fight with Grandma:)

 and the kids had fun playing with Grandpa too... and of course lego building.  Julian was very excited about making these clouds ;-)

 

We also made a special cake for America's birthday.  It actually worked out and looked awesome!  When we were getting ready for the day I told the kids to wear something patriotic or red and blue, so Gretch comes up with the Captian America costume on to wear to the parade.  She wore it the whole time and kept calling it Captain America day.  Now whenever we see an American flag or anything red white and blue, she's like, look a Captain America flag, a Captain America whatever.  So this was the Captain America cake;-)

 

 Apart from fun holidays we have had a lot of fun celebrating Harrison milestones.  He has been working hard on crawling.  He has been going backward and army crawling backward. He was taking little tiny "knee steps" forward and really did a solid crawl forward about five days ago.  He is not very fast but he's getting the hang of it and he is getting around even faster.  He also loves to make funs sounds, like a Chewbaka, or purring like a cat, he does a ton of zerbert sounds, and gasping sounds were he sucks in air.  So funny.  He can sit up all by himself and pulled himself up all by himself on July 19.  He also started waving over the fourth weekend and likes to point and clap his hands too.

Here he is in a nest that the kids built for him:)

enjoying the grass or future underwear model...

And enjoying some light reading material.

sitting

pulling up

and clapping

Gretchen and I were in the backyard and she saw the moon in the middle of the day.  She was all "look mom a full moon, oh actually it is a half moon."  I looked up to see that it was indeed a half moon... or at least more than a crescent moon and less than a full moon, which are also phases that Gretchen likes to identify accurately.  "Look mom, a crescent moon."  Oh man she is so fun!

Julian has been building mixels like crazy.  He loves the little mixel game and built an entire replica of the game with a path of different colors, nine mixels that could be mixed together to make different mixels (three groups of three), the whirlwind, and the starting mixel, as well as the buttons to push.  He makes armies of these guys and then mixes them all together like in the game.  He gets instructions online to build so many different ones that he doesn't actually own.  I love his creativity.  He keeps telling me that he wants to be a construction worker so hat he can build the house that he wants in our backyard.

 

We had such an awesome moment a few nights ago.  We were outside and the evening sky was so beautiful and the stars were so bright, way brighter than usual.  We checked out our planet app and realized that the bright stars we were looking at were actually Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  They were so bright and so was the moon.  It was crazy to realize that we were seeing half of our solar system with the naked eye and I just felt like with all the crazy stuff going on right now it is nice to remember that we are all apart of something so much bigger and so amazing.

 

Besides all that fun stuff we have been working on finishing off our bathroom downstairs and we are so excited because it is ready for paint now.  Hoorah!  That is a pic of me covered in sand and also of a table we made and painted.  Yay for getting projects done!

  We also celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary.  We went out for a nice dinner and sadly I did not get a picture of us together but it was a lovely night and we ate lots of yummy food.  So glad that I could celebrate this special day with my special guy.  Life keeps getting crazier and somehow he just keeps getting more wonderful.  I'm so grateful to share my life with and have a family with the best man I have ever known.  Here's to a million more. Years that is:-)