What I Missed

Ally had her ballet recital in June and I never got to blog about it.  I had my friend Kristen take some pictures of Ally in her costume because the ones the studio took didn't turn out very well and my camera is crappy.  I had to do it the day of the performance because Ally HATES getting her hair and make-up done.  I give her a year to a year and half before that changes ;).  Anyway, I lost the cd of pictures she gave me because I am awesome like that.  Ally found it for me on Sunday so now I can blog about it.  What would I do without her?

Her ballet teacher made up her own ballet called "La Danseuse de Ballet".  Ally was a Museum Mademoiselle.  It was loosely based on the children's book "Madeline" and Ally's job was to show the students around the museum while dancing beautifully, of course.

Side view of my pretty girl.  She looked like a different person without her glasses and her hair pulled back.

She got to dance with one of her best friends-Breonna.  We tried a new ballet studio this year and have enjoyed it.  It's ran much more organized than the previous one and it was cheaper. :)

I was going through pictures and realized I didn't have any good ones of Jensen.  So I had her snap a few of my happy guy.  He tends to do the "oversmile" a lot, but we did get some good ones of him.

And of course Holden had to get in on the action.  Logan was at work with Josh, so I didn't get any of him.  Ally really enjoys performing and she is a great dancer.  It is always a lot of rehearsals and practices, but it's worth it in the end.

Summer Vacation Day Five

I can't blog about this trip and not mention the playground in Woodland Park. We had to make a second trip to it before we left. The kids LOVED it!.  It was at the Elementary where Josh went to school.  He says it was similar when he was there but it was bigger now.  

Castle turrets, slides, a ship, tires, boats, swings etc.  Awesome!

Balancing Jensen.

Swinging Holden.

Every kid's dream!

Holden was not as happy about the ride home as the ride there.  We went home through Wyoming this time and the drive was much faster.  We made a stop at the "American Girl Mall" (not sure what it's really called) and let the kids pick out souvenirs at the Colorado Store and then hit the road home.  I lost count of how many movies the kids watched. Thank heavens for the DVD player!

It was a really fun trip, but we missed Willard.  There really is no place like home!

Summer Vacation Day Four

We started out our day with a drive through Garden of the Gods.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was kind of disappointing.  We have way better stuff in Southern Utah!  There was hardly anything to see and it was hot!

Here's the kids in front of the kissing camels.  Good luck finding them (the camels, not the kids)!

Balanced Rock.  The only other thing to see.

Holding up the rock.  My kids are so strong!

The next stop was "The North Pole at Santa's Workshop".  Everyone kept telling us we needed to go there, our kids were not convinced, but $95 later, there we were. (Side note: the pole was actually "perpetually frozen" and kinda cool.)

This is the "Giant Ferris Wheel".  I busted a gut when they called it that and said you could see all the way to Texas.  It ended up being a favorite ride, though.

Hey, little boy!  Keep your hands out of the water!  Yup-that's my little rule breaker.

Merry Christmas! It's ninety-five degrees!

Ally just LOVED Santa's workshop!

Meeting Santa.  Santa was very hot and sweaty in his little house.  Can you tell how excited Ally is to be there?

Holden was in heaven!  He loved everything about the place.  It was definitely geared towards the younger crowd.  There were a few fun rides for the rest of us, but we enjoyed watching Holden have so much fun.  Josh and I discovered that we're getting old.  Some of the rides made us sick.  It stinks to get old!

The whole reason we went on this trip was to go to "Symphony in the Clouds".  Josh has always remembered going to it as a kid and has wanted to go back.  It's at the Woodland Park Middle School and they have the symphony play.  At the end of the concert they play the 1812 Overture and the National Guard sets off cannons.  Then they add fireworks into the mix.  Holden was being naughty (throwing rocks) and as soon as the cannons started going off he screamed "help" and hid under the blankets.  Funny!  That's his scared face in the picture.

This is probably my favorite picture from the trip.  Holden's terrified face just cracks me up.  I guess I'm a mean Mom to laugh!

Summer Vacation Day Three

We started out day three at the Manitou Cliff Dwellings.

It was really fun to explore all the rooms and see how the Native Americans lived.  They had a lot of people living in tiny spaces!

This was the watch tower.

This is his "I'm going to be naughty" face.  He loved running around and climbing where he wasn't supposed to-as usual!

Our next stop was the Cripple Creek Rail Road.  It was a short little train ride with authentic coal smoke blowing in our faces-fun!  They showed us all the gold mines in the area.  There was a lot of gold in them thar' hills!

Holden was just a little excited to ride on the train.  When the engineer got in the front to start up the train, he clapped and yelled "Yay, train ride!".  It really was fun and interesting despite the coal smoke and the kids enjoyed it.

Happy Fourth of July!

Then we headed up to the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine for a tour.  This is how we entered the mine. Straight down in small elevator cars.  The kids were all nervous going down, but I thought it was fun.

Holden loved wearing his hard hat.  At least for a while.  I lost count of how many times he threw it on the ground by the end of the tour!

All ready to go down into the earth!  They weren't nervous yet.

This was after we descended.  Jensen pretty much looked like that the rest of the time.  Everyone else adjusted and had fun.  They took us on a ride on a mine train and it was fun, but they had the lights off for part of it so kids were a little freaked out.  It was really interesting learning about how they mine for gold.  We each ended up with our own little piece of raw gold (a rock with a minuscule trace of gold in it).

We got to try out the "manager's cart".  It was basically a bicycle on the mine cart tracks with places for people to stand on.  The mine tour was probably our favorite activity-well, except for Jensen.

After that we went shopping in Manitou and had some yummy ice cream and candy. The ice cream was called Josh & John's-very fitting for my ice cream loving Joshua John!  Then we tried to convince the kids to go see fireworks in one of the towns.  They didn't want to!  They wanted to go back to the hotel and swim!  So that's how we spent our Fourth of July evening.  I missed being at our little town's celebration. There's really nothing like it, but I loved experiencing new things with my family.

Summer Vacation Day Two

Since our whole family has been obsessed with baseball lately, we decided it would be fun to take the kids to a Colorado Rockies game while we were in Colorado.  

Here we are in front of Coors Field. 

Notice how our seats are nice and shaded?  The shade lasted all of 15 minutes and then we were in the sun. Then it was HOT, HOT, HOT!  Like burning in heck HOT!  We lasted until the fourth inning and then decided we were done cooking ourselves.  Here's a helpful hint for anyone planning to go to a Rockies Game-don't go to an afternoon game in July!  When we got to the car we found out it was 98 degrees-not fun!  We were not loyal enough fans to stick it out, I guess.

Jensen with the Presidents of the United States.  The people in front of us won a trip to Rapid City so Josh and Holden ended up on the Jumbo Tron briefly.  Josh didn't even notice the "presidents" or him being on the big screen.

Holden was fine until they sang the National Anthem and let off fireworks.  Then he was terrified and hated all the noise.  Can you tell he was hot?  The Rockies were playing the KC Royals and ended up losing 16 to 8.

Two days before our trip Ally discovered that there was an American Girl Store in Denver.  She had forty dollars saved up and decided she need $100 so she could get a doll.  She became my little chore girl for two days straight-that was awesome for me!  She even went to Grandma June's house to work for money, too.  She ended up with $90.00 and Josh and I were nice enough to donate the rest.  So after a half hour of trying to decide, she finally picked "Emily" to come home with her.

Then we drove to our hotel in Colorado Springs and went to visit Garden of the Gods.  We just made a quick stop at the Visitor Center and then Josh drove us to Woodland Park to show us his old house.

Yee Haw!

Summer Vacation Day One

About a month ago Josh and I were talking about how fun it would be to take a trip to Colorado for the fourth of July.  He has been talking about going there ever since we got married to show me where he lived until he was  in first grade.  Well, we sat down and figured out cost and decided we could fit it into our budget-yay!

So we stayed in town for Willard City's Patriotic Program on the first.  Ally was playing the piano and Jensen was singing in it and they both did great!  We slept in the next morning and then left about 9:30.  We decided to go through Vernal so we could go to Dinosaur Land.  Josh and I both remembered going there as kids and really enjoying it.  Well, it was a bad choice.  Apparently the Visitor Center is closed for remodeling.  Everything we read said we could still go see fossils, but everything was blocked off.  Lame.  The kids were really disappointed.

Here are the kids in front of where all the cool fossils are-that were blocked off.  And did I mention that it was HOT? We did pass through the town of Jensen.  All of my boys are named after towns in Utah and this was the first time Jensen had been to Jensen.  He wouldn't let me get a picture of him in Jensen though.

The only thing we got to see were some petroglyphs.  Then we went on our way.  A very long way!  It took forever to get to Denver!  We were in the car for 12 hours with a few stops here and there.  The kids did really well, though.  Even Holden.  He would point out the window and say "deer" every time we would see any kind of animal-cows, horses, birds-it was quite funny.  His phrase of the trip was also "Dinosaur Land".  He kept saying it over and over the whole trip.  It must have made quite the impression on him-not sure why though!  We arrived at our hotel in Denver around 9:30 and headed out to eat.  We went to Subway, which was right next to a liquor store and got "cased" as we went in.  Josh was quite nervous and had us all beeline for the car after we got our food.  Not a very good first impression of Denver!

Baseball/Softball

June is definitely Baseball (or Softball) month.  Ally, Logan and Jensen all joined teams and they have loved it!

This was taken after Jensen's last game.   They all had games on the same nights most of the time and it has been crazy shuffling them to their games.

Ally at her Softball game.  She has never played until this year, but she enjoyed watching the boys's games and wanted to give it a try.

Logan is all business.  He scored a home run a couple weeks ago.  

He usually plays center field.

Jensen loves to play!  He got a hit in every game this year.  

He even got to play catcher on his last game.

Holden LOVED going to the games.  He would ask every morning if this was a baseball game day.  He loved wandering around and having a "dog dog" or a "ice crise" (snowcone).  The people in the concession stand just loved giving him free snowcones-sometimes three or four a game!  He also liked to sneak up to the scoring booth and pretend to announce the games.  He got used to being up there because I took a few turns at score keeping which was pretty fun.

We definitely loved baseball season and are sad to see it be over.  Can't wait until next year!