okay, explanations!

Man, this summertime thing is a killer! Our schedule has been so busy since "summer" has started; it is crazy around here! It is only the second week and we have already had a block party in our neighborhood, a potluck/softball night with our home school group, numerous days/picnics at the park, violin lessons, piano lessons, piano recitals; and we are only in week two of four of Teagan's early morning violin camp! But here are some explanations of things we have been up to so far, with lots and lots of pictures!

Okay, the first pic of Teagan, Emmett and I was at a celebration party for Teagan on a computer literacy course she had just completed. It was a beta program for home schoolers and at the end of the course they had to take a big final exam, and they had a pizza party where they were given a certificate and their own leather-bound thumb drive! Teagan was in heaven with her award and the boys were in heaven with the Papa John's pizza and juice boxes!

Next picture in line came Emmett in his very first bathtub bath! Up until now he has always been a kitchen sink bather. He is almost 4 and a half months old, and he had just had one of those monstrous diaper explosions that went all the way up the back. So I wiped him down and decided he needed to hop in the bath with Owen to get all the way cleaned! This was on the 31st of May. Owen was playing with some Littlest Pet Shop characters (since they have magnetic feet and are great fun on a metal tub!) and Emmett was more concerned with them than with the bubbles or the amount of water in the tub. He did smile once or twice throughout the experience, but Garrett (our photographer while Mommy was busy keeping hold on the slippery one) didn't catch any of them! Owen was thrilled to have Emmett in the tub with him and kept asking me to let him hold him... but something about a slippery baby in a full tub of water made me hold onto Emmett really well!
The next picture of Teagan and Emmett comes from our newest past time - bike riding and park hopping. In an effort to get our family healthier, we have been trying to take a bike ride each evening. Usually we try to ride to a park somewhere nearby and then let the kids play for a bit before biking back home. This park in the pictures is about a mile and half away and the kids had a fun time playing there. This is the first time Emmett has gone down the slides with the bigger kids. He loved sitting at the top in their arms, but the going down part was not as great for him! His eyes would get really large and he would frantically search out where my face was to make sure everything was okay! It was sort of funny, at least from my side of the emotional roller coaster! I even let him slide down about a foot and a half of one all by himself while Tig held onto him. The moving part made him very nervous, but as soon as he stopped moving, he smiled and giggled!We now also ride our bikes everyday at lunchtime to a local school for the kids to eat lunch there. They are thrilled to finally get to go through a lunch line like "regular" kids do. Teagan got her first dose of lunch line drama today when the lunch lady got onto the girl in front of her for forgetting to grab her milk and then having to come back to get it after she had already left the line. When we sat down at a table Teagan told me that she will never forget her milk because if she does, she doesn't want to have to face that lunch lady! Welcome to public school life, Tig!

The other pictures were just some good ones of the boys - I love the one of Owen - he is sitting in the bathtub, but his little face looks so angelic... if only. And the one of Garrett is an actual smile of his, not one of his pretend, I'm-standing-in front-of-a-camera smiles. And it makes him seem so calm and relaxed, which he very rarely is: it's all movement, all the time with this kid!Since posting the teaser blog, Emmett has learned a couple of new things. The first of which was the wonderful discovery of his cute little feet! He stares at them a lot and tries to pull them to his mouth to suck on them as well as his fingers (still no true luck getting him on the paci instead!) I love seeing him stare at his feet. It was funny this past Sunday when I put shoes on him and he got so confused as to where his feet had gone off to. He kept looking and looking and had this puzzled look on his face. It almost made me feel guilty for putting socks and shoes on him.

His second trick is that he learned to sit up all by himself. He thinks that life is so much more interesting from the vantage point of sitting now and wants to do it all the time. The kids were playing with Scott's Rokenboks the other day and Emmett was enthralled watching the RC trucks driving around him. That made the kids even more tickled that they began to purposefully drive around him! I put the boppy around him just in case he decided to get a bit tipsy, but he does really good sitting! He starts to slump after 4-5 minutes, but he is a strong sitter for a lot longer than I thought he should be at 4 months old! (like the laundry in the back of the pictures? Lovely, eh?!)He also has decided that he loves being in the Johnny-jumper we have hanging in our dining room/living room doorway! I think it is the whole vantage point thing again :-) He is such a bouncy little guy in it and the kids love to sit on the floor near him and play with him - Owen especially!

I love how his little curls stand out in these pictures!

This weekend we went to the Utah Lake Festival and learned about a cool fish called the June Sucker. They only live in this one lake and there are less than 1000 of them left; so they are really endangered. Utah is cleaning its lake of the 300 tons (or some other astronomical amount...I don't really remember the amount, only that it was A LOT!) of carp that live there now who are part of the reason that this June Sucker fish is dying out. We thought they looked pretty neat! They are called "June Suckers" because they are bottom suckers and they lay their eggs in June... now you have a useless fact in your head! Your welcome!

After playing at the lake for a bit, watching some Hawaiian dancers, and eating a cold hot dog that was supposedly straight from the grill, we went for a drive along the Alpine Highway. We got to drive through the Quaking Aspen Forest, and the whole drive was beautiful! I had my head hanging out the window almost the whole way taking pictures, even though the temperature up there was quite a bit cooler than it had been down in the valley and the kids and I all had goose bumps. The Aspen Forest was just such a pretty place! I love Aspen bark :-) So we will end this post with some random pictures of trees and Utah scenery!