3rd Week of Summer - June 21st-27th

This past week started off with Father's Day.  I really kicked myself later for not getting a picture with Dad!  So, I found this one from a couple of years ago that I love.  Love you, Dad!

We got Kris the perfect shirt.  He is kind of the King of the Silly Shirts, so it fit him I thought.

I snapped this picture that morning at church as Lincoln was helping his dad serve communion.  Definitely one of Kris' strong points is his example to our kids of anything related to church, service, or spirituality.  I hope our boys can be like their daddy in this way one day!  This is definitely one way to help that happen.

Sunday was also extra special because it was Layton's 5th birthday.  Love my precious baby boy.  He wants to spike his hair up all of a sudden and it makes him look so big.

On Monday we went to Wye Mountain Berry Farm with Amy and Hannah Burton and picked blueberries and raspberries.  I love doing this!  However, my boys aren't much help anymore.  They are too distracted because they are either eating berries constantly or running around.  Oh well.  I have a freezer full of berries!

More days at the pool.

Lincoln was bored so I gave him a project.  I told him to go make something that started with the letter 'A' out of his Legos.  He did and thought that was pretty cool.  So, we kept going.  He got to 'E' before he was bored again.  Maybe we can start at 'F' next time!

Alligator

Bee

Cup

Drum Stick

Egg

On Thursday we met Kris at his office parking lot and had a free lunch thanks to First Security Bank.

Hannah has had the itch to sew lately.  She came up with this little teddy bear project all on her own.  I helped her start the buttons, but she did the rest herself.  Love it!

Finally, we ended the week in Texarkana for my cousin, Casey's, wedding.  It was beautiful.

He married a girl that had a little girl named Ava.  This is her walking down the aisle with my cousin, Tyler and Uncle Mark.  Precious!

Never even noticed Tyler photo bombing in this pic until someone pointed it out on Facebook.

Me with some of my cousins, Amy, Ali, Jolie, and Linzi.

Kari and Ali.

Uncle Mark, Tyler, Aunt Suz, and Casey.  Missing Ali in this picture.

We left after the wedding to come home, but the kids stayed with my parents.  I've got a few much needed days to myself.  Lots of catching up on things to do!

2nd Week of Summer - June 14th-20th

Our second week of summer was crazy busy.  Our 14th wedding anniversary was on Tuesday.  We really didn't celebrate that night because I had a tennis game, but Kris got me some beautiful flowers and a sweet card.  Hopefully, we can celebrate this week because the kids are gone.  I can't believe it has been 14 years.

The big kids went to a program that the school has called Summer Blast.  It was all morning long all week long.  They got to pick 2 classes that they wanted to do all week out of several different ones.  Lincoln and Hannah both picked Internet Millionaire where they got to learn how to create their own website.  They came home everyday so excited and loving what they learned.  Lincoln also did K-nex Engineering.  He got to build with K-nex.  His buddy, Jack, did it too so it was even more fun.

Hannah's second class was called Calling All Chefs.  She missed the first day where they made bacon and eggs because she had been running a fever.  She did get to learn how to make a smoothie, pizza rolls, Rice Krispie Treats, and a Koolaid pie.  They also talked about different cooking utensils etc.  She ate it up!

At the end of the week Lincoln went for a couple of hours in the afternoon to a sports program through the Boys & Girls Club called D.A.R.T.  It stands for Discipline, Attitude, Respect, and Trust.  They teach these things while the kids learn about either football, soccer, basketball, or wrestling.  Lincoln could only do the afternoon session which was basketball and wrestling.  I think he did basketball one of the three days and wrestling the other two.  He came home the last day so excited and pumped about wrestling.  It cracked me up.  He talked about how he beat a couple of people and was showing us his moves.  He even tried to put the moves on Layton later.  We had to have a little talk about Layton being much smaller than him.  Ha!  Who knows?  He may take after his daddy! 

 

I have been sticking to my guns about technology so far this summer.  They get one hour a day on their Kindles and can't watch t.v. until 4:00.  So, they are having to come up with other things to do.  We went to the library and signed up for the summer reading program.  Friends have come over to play and we have played some board games.

Many days cooking dinner is just not fun to do either because I'm tired or it is hot.  So, I discovered making my own "rotisserie" chicken in the crockpot was the perfect thing.  It cooks all day.  The meat falls off the bones and I can get 2-3 meals out of it.

This day we went to Tropical Smoothie Cafe because they were giving out free smoothies if you wore flip flops to the store.  Yum!!

Lincoln had another home meet over the weekend.  This was a crazy busy weekend.  We had swim meet, Layton's birthday party, my parents' 40th anniversary, and Father's Day.  Because we had to leave fairly quickly to get to Layton's party by 10:30, Lincoln could only do the first two events--the Freestyle and the Backstroke.

Lincoln cut his time down even more this time!  Way to go, Buddy!

Waiting his turn.

The backstroke is definitely Lincoln's weakest stroke.  I was just proud of him for giving it a go!

We raced over to the Tyndall Park Splash Pad for Layton's birthday party afterwards.  I'll make a separate post about it.

Mom and Dad had come down the night before for Layton's birthday.  We surprised them Saturday morning when Wes showed up at the party.  He flew in from Dallas so we could all be together to celebrate Mom and Dad's 40th wedding anniversary.  I think they were pretty surprised!  That night we took them out to eat a nice steak dinner at The Butcher Shop.

We surprised them with a gift card to go see Jonah at the Sight and Sound Theater in Branson.

The happy couple!  ;-)

Reading our card.

Dad surprised Mom with a little hand written letter that morning that was super sweet and unexpected.  Mom let us all read it.  Jeff got very emotional reading it and then got really tickled at himself.  It was awesome!

This was Wes' face as he was reading it.  I think he was trying not to cry.  ha!

It was a great ending to a really great week!