Our Lazy Summer

I hope my kids remember this summer. I know chances are they won't, but I am pretty sure they will never have one just like it again. With as awful as I have felt, we have had plenty of time to just be lazy, ride bikes, play with friends in the neighborhood, and sit under the trees eating pop-cycles. It has been simple yet so what we all needed! To be totally fair, it wasn't all fun and games, just mostly :) We did do chores, read a lot of books (I had to put a time limit on the time sweet Hailey could read:), and even did math worksheets and a few science projects. We hiked to Donut Falls, camped in the backyard, enjoyed family up at East Canyon, roasted marshmallows, played at parks, and had sibling sleepovers. One of our favorites places to be..grandmas! We spent lots of time swimming with cousins...

The two older kids joined a swim team and Easton took swimming lessons. My kids really LOVE to be in the water! They participated in a swim meet, luckily each of the kids won at least 1 gold medal. (I hate it when one of the kids feels bad because of the success of another!)

We braved Lagoon not once but twice, and I took 2 pictures. Nice! (I did puke in a Lagoon toilet. Totally disgusting!) After that Easton and I went to the car and watched movies while I continued to puke in bags and John and the other two kids finished up on the "big kid" rides in the dark. Sweet Easton never complained and just kept saying, "I am so sorry you are sick mommy!" :) Memories!

And we went to the zoo. We loved the new exhibit. My kids could have watched the River Otters, Seals and Sea Lions for hours!

I am not sure that any of us are ready for the school schedule yet, but ready or not, here it comes!

Easton's cakes from the Family Parties

These are the cakes we made for Easton's family birthday parties...very simple yet they made the child so happy! My kind of cake!

Easton had a BIRD-DAY!

For the last year Easton has stressed about turning 5. Why??? Because when you are 5, your teeth just might start falling out! He is so worried for some reason about loosing his teeth. He has watched Hailey and Coleton and he knows that new teeth grow, but that does not make his anxiety any less. I just told him that he wouldn't be 5 for a long time so he didn't need to worry about it. As winter turned to spring and then to summer Easton was still so sure he did not want to be 5. I decided we had to do something to make this little boy excited to be 5. We talked about how it is normal for teeth to fall out but his might not fall out when he is 5...didn't help. We went to the dentist and let the dentist talk to him about it...didn't help. I finally decided to just start talking about what we would do on his 5th birthday. I gave him tons of ideas, but it wasn't until I mentioned an angry bird birthday that he decided that would be fun enough and it would be ok to be 5. All summer long we have talked about his party and made preparations for it. Easton helped in all of the planning. He knew just how he wanted it! We spent hours searching the internet for ideas and came up with some of our own. We made our own pinata, which was so fun and easy. I have never done anything like that, but it was well worth it. We used a punch balloon from the dollar store for the middle and layered newspaper around it. (I found a website that had a pinata that was super cute and kind of went off of that, but Easton insisted that we hit the pig not the bird) We did 8 layers of newspaper. We used a flour/water mixture as the glue. Then we spray painted it green and used another site to print out the detail. We cut a small hole in the top and the kids added the candy. We used two zip ties for the hanger and then used a rope to hang it with. This is how it turned out.

Easton made the cupcake decor. We just punched holes and put stickers in the middle, then we taped toothpicks on the back.

The day of the party, we had both helium balloons and regular balloons and put the faces from that site on them. We also used that site to print out faces and put on the party hats. They turned out super cute. We also spray painted easter eggs white and went on an egg hunt.

We found so many ideas of live angry bird games. We just spray painted boxes and used green balloons with the faces we printed off as the pigs. We used a water balloon launcher and small rubber balls to hit the boxes. It was so fun!

Easton was so happy and we made it through the entire day without worrying about teeth falling out. He was surprised that it didn't feel any different to be 5 and that his cheeks hadn't changed, but that was it!