Memorial Day Weekend

We worked like crazy the entire last week of May trying to get our rental house ready for June.  I felt bad neglecting the kids on time so we spoiled them with attention memorial day weekend.  We started it out with a surprise birthday party for their bears.  They LOVED it and started planning their Scout Dog's next birthday party.

 It was too cold to swim so we played in the paddle boat and canoe.

We had a fun weekend of relaxing with the family!

Dance Recital

Here are my cuties at the dance recital!

Kenya, Jasmine, Whitney S., Emmie, Whitney W., McKenzie, Brynlee, and Tucker

 Each girl got to do a solo. Here is Whitney in action!

 Tommy really felt bad he didn't get to do dance this year so I let him do dance with Tucker for Tucker's dance.  Aren't my boys cute?!?!

May Happenings

May was another crazy month after doing Mark's party, and working every spare second fixing up another rental house we bought.  It doesn't look like much, but I love it and would be sorely tempted to move into it if it was a little bigger.  You can exit out the top floor, basement, and main and has a crazy lay out so you feel like you could get lost in it.

For Mother's Day I was too tired to want to do much.  The kids made me cards a ton of pictures and cards.  When I expressed how much I liked them, they raced to make me more! 

Here is the best of the cards I received!

Whitney once again was super thoughtful and decided that she needed to give me a gift so she put this little package together and wrapped it up.  The items inside cracked me up!  Notice a broken bead, and 2 of the jelly beans are half eaten!! haha!

 Whitney had year end field trips and preschool graduation.  She is a smarty pants and can already sound out easy words.  I thought Tommy was ahead last year, but she is reading much more than he was as she is always trying to keep up with him and he takes time to read books with her and teach her. It is very cute. Almost all the kids had some silly thing they wanted to be when they grow up and Whitney wanted to be a dentist and a mom.

 From Day 1 of preschool, Whitney thought it was wonderful that there was another Whitney in her class and they became instant best friends.  Here they are singing their songs together.

 Here is Whitney getting her diploma.

 Whitney W. and Whitney S!

 Here is Tucker at lunch.  He continually cracks us up and makes sure he never gets over looked with our busy schedule!  He is one who will wear a hat or mask all day long and not notice it.

Here he is, bravely feeding a duck!  That duck came right up to him and took that bread!

 Making costumes and doing extra practices took up a lot of time in May as well.  Here is my cute little dancers.  We had 2 of them not do the final recital, which worked out okay as 8 is still a lot to handle!!

 I was busy recording at the recital so this is the only picture I wound up with!  Hopefully I can get more from other moms!

 I was in charge of Tommy's end of the year class party so we had a field day outside and made a book for his teacher.

Here is the cover of the book and then on the inside I had them write answers about their teacher and their year in kindergarten. 

 Tommy only got one show and tell all year and they did it the last day of school.  He thought long and hard about all the things he could show and decided his best toy was the building blocks his Grandpa Miller made him.  It was supposed to fit in his backpack so we took a picture of all of them and shoved as many as we could in his pack to build there.  He proudly explained how much work his grandpa had to put into each and every block. :)

Color Run

Tommy's school did a color run fundraiser so we had the whole family join in the fun.  Here is our family ready to start the race!

 Vic is very diligent about stretching so we here is our the boys decided to stretch.

 We decided that since Tommy is faster than Whitney that Vic would run with him and I would run with Whitney.  She started off crying because there was people in front of her (we started at the back of the heat).  I told her that the faster she ran, the faster the race would be over so she took off and I couldn't keep up with her!  She was so proud to be the fastest runner in our family!

 After we both finished, we went back to find Tommy and finish the race with him.  He wasn't too pleased as an adult had ran him over while dodging a chalk fight so here we are trying to cheer him up to finish.

 We had trained hard so I had Tommy start over and he ran hard once he saw the finish line.

 Our little blasts of color!

 I'd say Tucker got covered the most of anyone!!!

Afterwards we went to the zoo to finish out our family day.

Mark's 60th Cowboy Party

Mark turned 60 so my mom wanted a party of things he loves.  He loves to dress up and go to cowboy shooting competitions and he loves the color red so our theme was born!

Here is birthday boy with all of his local grand kids.

 Here is my mom, his sister from Texas, Mark, his mom, and his Uncle Charlie from Texas as well.  It was so nice to have them there!

Here is the invite I made:

 Here is a poster I made to welcome guests.

 His cowboy cart he takes to shoots.

 The dessert wall

 His cake was a combined effort of my mom, me, Aunt Dawn, and a cake lady as I didn't have time for it and my mom was in a sling.

 I came up with clever treats to fit the theme!

 Mark loves ginger snaps and molasses cookies so I made those "mud pies"

 We had LOTS of yummy food!

 Pulled pork sandwiches from our local yummy Pitmaster restaurant.

 The "waterin' hole" was one of my favorite decorations.

 We had everyone eat in the "jail house" that I made bars to get into from each side.

 It filled up fast in there!

 We had the kids eat in the little jail house....

Tommy has quite the mean face when he tries!

 Sam

 Sad Whitney!

 Cute Cowgirl

 Little kid table... and adult overflow!

 After dinner I had games for the kids to play.  I'd say the panning for Gold was the biggest hit.  It took me an entire can of gold spray paint to make all the gold!

 Will was especially obsessed.  I checked the time stamp between this picture and later pictures of him and he did it off and on for an hour and 45 minutes straight!

 He talked his great Aunt Dawn into doing it for quite awhile with him too. :)

 Our cowboy shooting are for the kids.  The adults were supposed to do a shooting gallery too, but we ran out of time to set it up!

 The kids had a blast doing hay rides up and down the hill...

 ...and of course I got put to work when they got tired of pulling each other.

 Vic and Tucker played this for quite awhile... Tucker had an accident while I was getting ready for the party and I was so busy I never got him back in his pants (why he is wearing pajamas at the party!)

 We ended the night with Mark blowing out his cake and eating desserts.

 Mom insisted that a trail mix be their thank you gift so I thought I was pretty clever coming up with this sign for it!

 Here is our hard-working cowboy family!  ...and you can see the "outhouse" sign on the bathroom door, hehe! :)