Yesterday we made a batch of gooey gunk.  The girls played with it for TWO HOURS!  It is pretty cool stuff…stretchy, squishy, quite entertaining.  I found out about it here, where you can get the recipe.  FYI…Elmers glue is on sale right now at Walmart for 25 cents if you want to make some. 

My little girl turned FIVE!!  Holy crap I have a five year old!  We had her party on Sunday.  All of our family came over as usual and we had a big taco feast. 

The theme she chose this year was “flowers”.  The invite:

I didn’t want to make a pinata.  It takes three days and the glue is smelly.  I thought that maybe a gift bag would make a good piniata, so I found a flowery bag and filled it up with several tissue-paper bundles of candy and party favors. 

Bam Bam taking a swing:

Julibean:

Mini Kinee:

Birthday Girl:

Even Josh couldn’t break the dang thing, and he was swinging with incredible force!

So Karin gave it a whack or two:

And Uncle Kiki:

Finally!  Notice that Krista has Nash in a choke hold to keep him from getting hit in the face with a bat…:)

Well I’m never making a pinata again, this one took five seconds to make and was stronger.

Then it was on to the PRESENTS.  Holy cow Bethany was sooooo happy.  I don’t know what happened to this picture, but here she is opening her precious Baby Alive.  She has been asking for Baby Alive for months. 

She wanted to play with the baby right away.  So, this baby is called baby Alive because it really eats and drinks and POOPS. 

See?  It’s a super fantastic toy to have in the house.  Especially when the baby’s mommy forgets to put a new diaper on and it pees all over your couch.

Thank you everyone for making her day a great one!!!  We love you Bethany Ann!!

After we delivered the cake and cupcakes, we grabbed some Subway sandwiches and headed down to one of our favorite parks, the Boise Municipal park.  We had a little picnic and then roasted ourselves in the sun while we looked at the fishies and wildlife.

Nice fake pose, girls. 

Bethany and Julia smashed their very first penny.  My sister and I would always love to use the penny smashing machines whenever we went anywhere that had one.  Hopefully they will have a nice collection when they are grown, but we hardly ever go anywhere so they’ll probably only end up with a few.  Oh well.

Are these not the cutest things you have ever seen?

They look even cuter when there are 40 of them.

They look even cuter when they are sitting under this matching cake!

But wait, they look the best of all when there are several tiers of cuteness!

Ok you get the point, they’re cute.  I hope they didn’t taste like crap though.  Thanks Carmen!

We spent an awesome weekend up at Lake Fork with some of our buddies over the holiday weekend.  Beware, picture overload!

The kids spent a LOT of time on Tonka Truck hill! 

3 second exposure, beautiful!

I turned around and took this picture after I heard Neil say, “What the….geez!  I’m surrounded by munchkins!”

All of the manly men had to build some sort of bridge across the creek so that we could get to the waterfall on the other side.  They ended up getting two logs to span the length of the water.  Then we all crossed and went for a hike.

Crossing the log.  Not the safest thing I have ever seen…that’s a baby in there!

Alyce almost goes down, but she has ninja skills and she made a quick recovery.

Awwwww.

The kids put on a little play for us, it was called “Hansel and Gretel, the remix”.  It was so funny!  Here is the cast and crew.

FYI to all Lake Fork attendees this August, this is what the water spigot currently looks like.  Sealed up tight.

Mason chasing his girlfriend…:)

He finally got tired of Julia playing “hard to get”, so he stopped her and said, “can’t we just dance?”

On Sunday night, we drove into Mccall for the very excellent fireworks on the lake.  This pic is blur-city, but this is us on the edge of the lake watching the show.  The fireworks were honestly amazing.

Baby Beano striking a pose for me!

We had so much fun.  Sorry for the lack of commentary, but it’s a lot of work to put in 25 pictures and I’m tired. :)  Thanks for coming guys, and we missed you Kip and Jess!

I saw this idea somewhere online, to freeze some toys inside a big block of ice.  Then you give it to your kids and have them figure out ways to get the animals out.

Oh boy.  Look at those filthy feet.

Bethany preferred the “smash with a rock” technique.

They also tried warm water..

And toothbrushes…

Julia lost interest after about five minutes, she just kept saying, “mom, get them out!!”  She didn’t quite grasp the concept.  Bethany followed through to the end though, finally choosing to throw the ice block to get the rest of the animals out.

It was pretty fun overall.  A nice activity to do on a hot day.

For letting us mooch off of you for the second year in a row (and thanks Clint).  Hopefully we can take advantage of your company picnic for many years to come even though noone in our immediate family works there.  We enjoyed lots of cotton candy and kettle corn, a huge bbq, and lots of other games and fun stuff.  Neil was backpacking, so Richy came instead with Cam.

Sorry Richy, you were making weird faces in most of the pictures, but oh well. 

The pony rides were a huge hit with Julia and Cam.  Bethany wasn’t so sure about the ponies, but she finally got up the courage to ride the “baby” one.

For hanging out with us this weekend.  We ♥ you.

Bethany just amazes me sometimes.  So I was in the kitchen making dinner and Bethany was outside playing with her neighbor friend.  She comes running in the house and says that she wants to show me something.  So I go out there and see her cruising around on the neighbor girl’s bike with NO training wheels!  I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw her, I couldn’t believe it.  It might not sound like a big deal, but it is a major milestone in my mind.  I distinctly remember being much older when I learned to ride without training wheels, and I also remember crashing a lot (into parked cars!).  I figured it would take hours of pushing her down the street to get her balance before she would be able to do this.  So here is Bethany, who taught herself to ride a bike in a matter of minutes.

Here she is on her own bike, training wheel free!  Good job Bethany!

I think it’s pretty obvious what happened here!  Poor girl had a profusely bleeding thumb for a while, I thought I wasn’t going to get the bleeding to stop but it finally did so we decided against getting stitches.  She has a couple of scraped knees too.  The thing that she was crying the most about though was the fact that she broke grandma’s porcelain doll, she really felt terrible.  She made a tearful phone call to grandma after she got cleaned up, it was really sweet.  “Grandma I was running and I broke your glass baby and I’m SO sorry!”