Bed Head...

The midgets love a sleep over on the "couch bed". I love it because they will help clean up the TV room so that we can pull the bed out. I also love that in theory it will get Pickles out of my bed... for a few hours at least.

Daddy was first to fall asleep ( the pranks will start in a few years ) and when I went out around 11:30 to make sure the sleep timer on the TV had worked I found two boys bright eyed and bushy tailed watching Arthur episodes on Netflix. Ha ha...

I guess those naps at 6:00 PM are to blame...I thought the fakers were just trying to get out of cleaning their room.

Here's the aftermath. Figgurs and Bed Head. Love em.

It begins...

Wednesday was Jordan's first day of Kindergarten. I dropped him off in his classroom and he never even looked back. The only tears shed that day were mine. Dillon did cry out "JoJo" pitifully as we exited the building.

As usual he was a little nervous about going. I admit I was worried for him. I was pleasantly surprised when he came home and told me that "he loved school", "didn't know it would be so fun", and most of all that he made a new friend named Casey. It's a Hunt family joke that every year my Mom told Betsy to find someone who looked nice and say "Hi my name is Betsy, do you want to be friends?" I totally gave him the Betsy talk and it worked!

Jordan is such a smart and intuitive little boy. He brings our family so much happiness. He is the best son & brother and we are all very excited and happy for him. School is just what his inquisitive mind needs! He sure is ready!

When I say "we" are happy I mostly mean Blair and I. His brother? Not so much. He misses his JoJo like crazy! (this was pretty much the look he had all day)

July in review...

I sort of took the month of July off from blogging... and I didn't even mean too. Life has a way of running off on me like that.

We celebrating our Nations Birthday with a swim & BBQ at G&G Hunt's house. I also spent my monthly grocery budget on school clothes with my Mom and Sister. Happy 4th of July indeed! These little beauties were bought there as well...

< insert cat calls> The kids all loved them. I thought they were quite a fashion statement.

Towards the middle of the month we got a new niece Zoey. She showed up 6 weeks early... impatient little thing! This meant Grandma K. was gone for a few weeks... and that meant the boys coming to work with Mom (one day only, and that was more than plenty.)

It also meant that my very sweet sister Gillian has been babysitting for a few weeks. She's very brave and very wonderful. Blair and I can't thank her enough.

We spent the 24th of July up in Snowflake enjoying the cool weather and Pioneer Day activities. The midgets LOVE Snowflake. They have so much fun up there!

We are back in Buckeye with Daddy (and Aunt Gill) and we have had a laid back weekend before school starts... that's right my baby starts school in 3 days.

And that was July 2010.

When you're strange...

It has been a sad, strange little week (past week) round these parts. We returned home from vacation after taking an extra day to lounge in the pool and take the kids to Toy Story 3. We pretty much got thrown right back into "real life" with no buffer.

Sunday was our second day in our new ward, in our new building, with new classes to teach (sub) and new teachers for the boys. The bribe of a garbage truck kept Dillon in his chair. It also helped that he passed out on his sweet sub halfway through sharing time (thanks again Darice).

You would think that with seeing the movie he has been waiting months for, along with new toys would keep the Pickle happy. Wrong! He became increasingly grumpier as the week went on. Poor buddy was having some severe sinus issue and couldn't sleep, wouldn't eat, and grouched the whole day through. He's since been diagnosed with strep throat and after a couple days of meds he is on the mend and back to his normal self (still pretty grumpy, but with a dimply smile). I often ask him if he is a sweet pickle or sour pickle. We have very different answers...

Usually JoJo takes the brunt of Dillon's anger but this week I think it has fallen on Mom & Grandma K. Remember way back when I called Jordan MOUTH... its's times like these that I am glad that I blog. Because I can see that almost 4 year old boys are like this. And it does get better.

It's just really hard when you go to a baby shower and a lady from your ward tells you how she and her husband were laughing at Dillon growling at me and saying that he was going to kill me in the middle of Sacrament Meeting. At least someone is laughing...

While he might take the brunt of the abuse JoJo gets his punches in too. Literally. For weeks he is scratched, choked, bit etc then he waits until Mom & Dad are out of the room and he clocks his brother with a right jab to the face. Aren't brothers wonderful?

It's especially wonderful when your husband lets you take a leisurely hot bath on a Sunday afternoon only to have your baby trotted in with blood gushing from his nose.

No worries... Dillon said "What's this red stuff? It's awesome!"

Indeed...

Yo-Semite...

Half Dome

For our "something different" summer trip we decided on Yosemite. Both Blair and I were envisioning forests full of Giant Redwoods (wrong) lots of bears (wrong) and it being as beautiful as Yellowstone  (wrong wrong wrong). We have come to the conclusion that we are glad we saw it, but once was definitely enough. We are officially Yellowstone people.

The trip wasn't miserable by any means. And Yosemite is beautiful, but you can only drive so far through a forest with nothing to see but forest. And the super winding roads were killer on all our stomachs. Especially the little two. (Yes Mom I was prepared with barf buckets... but Dill puked on himself and in a snack bowl and Jordan made it to the parking lot and puked all over my feet.)

In the sun at the Glacier Point overlook

Found some shade!

Yosemite has some amazing waterfalls. We went at the perfect time of year when all of them were running. They have a few that only flow during the melt off of early summer.

Bridal veil Falls from Tunnel View

Getting wet underneath BV Falls

Two crazy boys in fromt of the rushing rapids

For me the most noticeable difference was the lack of visible animals. I know they were there but it was nothing like driving through Yellowstone and seeing bears, bison, moose, elk, coyotes etc... We saw a couple squirrels and that was it. 

What I was looking forward to the most was seeing the Redwoods. Growing up I watched the movie "The Gnome Mobile" and I envisioned that Yosemite was just like that. In reality there is only one grove of the giant trees. They are still pretty amazing.

Two Sisters

The Midgets in comparison to the California Tunnel Tree

While not entirely as expected the trip was fun. We got out of the heat and saw the beauty of the country. All our trips this summer have solidified the desire I have to travel with my children (come what may) and show them the beauty of the world that we are lucky to live in. 

Pebbles...

After our stop to see the seals we continued on up the coast...

 Our next scheduled stop was to take the midgets to the Aquarium in Monterey. We decided to get there via the 17 mile drive through Pebble Beach. Thankfully our trip was the week before the Masters and we were able to do it. If only we were millionaires and Blair could play the course there. It was awesome. Even the buck that was minutes away from from getting run over by us was awesome  (who would have that we would see that on a golf course on the beach).

You can't drive that close to the beach without getting your feet in the sand at least once right? They had a ball!

That was until they realized just how cold the water is! Poor Pickles turned blue!

Seals...

Well we did it! We survived our last "big" vacation of 2010 (and probably our last for a long time).  We broke from the usual tradition of visting Yellowstone and decided that this year we were going to go to Yosemite instead. The boys prepped for the trip by watching Yogi Bear cartoons and thought we were headed t o Jellystone so really it didn't matter much where we went.

We took the scenic route to get there and traveled along the Pacific Coast Highway. It was such a pretty drive. Espcially the farther north we got. The best stop by far was at the Elephant Seal rookery near Piedras Blancas.

 The beach was absolutely covered in seals! The boys thought it was awesome. And stinky! Oh Boy it was stinky! We mostly saw the big males who were either fighting or lounging it the hot sand sloughing off their winter fur. Dillon and I kept a lookout for babies but didn't spy any.

 Maybe I can convince Blair to head back in December when the babies are born. But I doubt it...