Summer Days

Every week, we meet other moms and kids from our ward at a park. This park had a purple hat slide. I went down it a couple of times. It goes pretty fast. It also had a little river where the kids tried to catch fish.

Van looks so small in the swing, but he liked it.

Rusty loves his corn on the cob almost as much as he enjoys wearing no shirt. He has been known to climb over the patio wall and throw corn on the cob at passing cars. Where was his mother? Poor parenting.
This was at the Denver Zoo. The kids love it going to the zoo, but Stone thinks it takes too long to get there. We recently bought a membership and I'm sure we will go often.
Last weekend was the ward camp out. Luke wasn't able to go because of work, but I was brave and took the kids by myself. I knew they would have fun and our last camping trip got cancelled because of the weather. It was fun. It was really close to town so only five families stayed over night and four of them have babies. I didn't sleep very well because I was so cold and we were on a slope. Van and Rusty slept all night but Stone kept wiggling out of his sleeping bag so I had to keep helping him get back in. Luke was able to come up in the morning for breakfast and to take down the tent.

Our trip to Vail

We took a trip to Vail, Colorado for a week with my family. My Mom, Dad, Sara, Tanya and Marisa met us up there. It was a lot of fun. Tanya and her baby Marisa surprised us. We didn't know they were coming. The drive from Denver to Vail is beautiful. It is about 100 miles and we only had to stop once so the boys could empty their bladders. On the side of the road of course. (One advantage to having boys.) We did a lot of fun things. We rode the gondola up to the top of the mountain, we went on a hummer ride in the mountains, we went swimming, took some short nature walks, shopping and to a BBQ on a ranch. The ride up the gondola was fun. We ate lunch at the top of the mountain and took some great pictures. There was a nature center up there. Stone had to show everyone the animal poop display.

Sara, Elaine, Janna and Tanya in Vail village. Someone needs to remind me not to stand next to Tanya in pictures, I look like an Amazon woman.

On Rusty's birthday, we rode the paddle boats and went swimming. Luke and my Dad went golfing. They didn't want to take any kids with them.

The Hummer ride was a lot of fun. The boys liked it because they didn't have to sit in car seats. My dad stayed with the babies and both of them had poopy diapers while we were gone. Moded. We drove on a trail that went through a beautiful aspen grove. At the top were some beautiful vistas.

Stone and Rusty love to throw rocks in the river. We had to stop many times on our little hike to let them throw rocks.

We got to meet Marisa for the first time. She is a month older than Van. We took many pictures of them. I like this one with Marisa leaning on Van.

We found a few different fun playgrounds for the boys to play on. They really liked the pirate ship. They also had fun playing in the fountains in Vail Village. They got soaking wet.

At the BBQ, we went on a hay ride. Stone and Rusty got to sit up front with the driver. The horses both farted during the ride. It was nasty because we were at the front of the wagon. After the first horse farted, Rusty got down and sat in the wagon. Stone and Rusty went on pony rides. The food was great, especially the corn on the cob.

Family Pictures

As you can see by our new header, we had family pictures done. Our professional photographer is Shannon Dickman of Brittann Photography. We know the Dickman's from our time at BYU. Her husband Tim and I met our first summer there while I was in summer classes and he was walking on the football team. We live about 20 minutes from them now. Here are a few samples of our shoot. The link to the rest of the pictures on http://www.pictage.com/ is www.pictage.com/352097. If you want to see the pictures and I haven't sent you the link, email me and I will send you an announcement with the link. I haven't quite figured out pictage's process.

We were able to do this session in less than an hour in a field nearby with a raging storm moving in. A friend asked how we got the boys to cooperate. Good question. I believe it included some bribery for a trip to McDonalds and getting to go back to the Dickman's house and play with their girls, who they play with wonderfully and without any fighting--EVER. In fact Shannon I believe said she likes having them over because then she can actually get stuff done! (Shannon if that isn't true you can correct me in the comments.)

So this field was nearby their house and had a great slope up to the storm. She was able to get several shots of Rusty, who is our little GQ boy. He is so cute she could take hundreds of pictures and it would never get old. We took several family ones both standing and sitting. Van was awake for the standing ones and fell asleep quickly after we sat down. Stone and Rusty played a little, but they were able to not get too wound up and did a great job. It is kind of funny because their smiles are so forced sometimes. They like the pursed lips smile and Stone will throw in the top row of teeth over his pursed lips smile. Pretty funny to watch. It is hard to catch them in a natural smile, but considering they are ages 4 and 3, we'll take what we can get.

Please take a few minutes and check out Shannon's Blog and her Brittann Photography Website (which she does herself). She does an awesome job.

Books and Birthdays

Well I haven't read these books yet, but for those of you who have, you might find this article interesting. http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2007-08-15-eclipse_N.htm If you don't have time to read it, the article basically talks about the author being a BYU grad and how a dream she had inspired the stories. The coolest part to me is that it unseated the 7th Harry Potter book as #1 on USA Today's best selling list. That is really saying something when you unseat what will probably be the most sold of the 7 Harry Potter books.

While I am on the topic of Harry Potter, I want to say that from last Saturday night to Wednesday morning my life was engulfed by my in-law's copy of the 7th Harry Potter book, Deathly Hallows. Wayne, my father-in-law, finished it so Elaine, my mother-in-law could start it on their trip to Avon, CO. Since she had already started another book, she let me read it but told me it went with her when they left.

Well, I knew I had to leave Wednesday morning to come back to work, so I had about 4 days to read 756 pages. I averaged about 80 pages an hour when I read, and I finished it Wednesday morning just before I left. What a whirlwind of a story. All I will say is that it was excellent. I read it so fast though that I didn't have a lot of time to digest it. Last night at work I kept thinking about it and trying to process all of that information. Whew.

Janna and the boys returned home this afternoon, so we will post about our vacation sometime in the next few days. Van is 3 months old today. Rusty had his 3rd birthday on Monday. My mom's birthday is tomorrow, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM. Your presents are coming, they are just going to be a little late.

Rusty's Batman Birthday Party

Rusty's 3rd birthday is on August 13, but we started celebrating early. He was so excited to go to Chuck E Cheese as you can tell by the picture.

















Stone and Rusty riding the Monster Truck.












My camoflauge boys.













Rusty wanted to have a Batman birthday party. He has been waiting for weeks. Finally the day comes. He had a lot of friends show up and everyone had a good time. They played a game where they had to place the Batman sticker on the correct spot on Batman. The Batman pinata was Rusty's favorite part.





































When his friend handed him the present in a spider man bag, Rusty said "But it is a Batman birthday party!" He got a lot of fun presents. And enough candy for the rest of the year.




























Van slept through most of the party.

Reminiscing about the Good Times

The past week I have had the opportunity to catch up with dozens of friends from my Freshman year at BYU. Some by phone, most by blogging. My friend Camille found our site through the Jergensen's, and well, if you can find Camille or she finds you, you now find almost everyone else. It has been fun reading about everyone and seeing where they are at both as a location and where they are at in their lives with their families. Lucky for us the Dickman's live close, so we get to see them on a somewhat regular basis, but not everyone can live close by. A few years ago we were visiting Jeremy & Liz down in Riverside and we were reminiscing about that great year and what a huge impact that had on our college life and beyond. We literally had a group of more than 30 of us that were really close friends.

We made it a priority to do something about it and so back then we created a Yahoo Group and started recruiting any of our friends that we could find that were a part of that group. We currently have about 14 people on it and are looking for anyone from that is interested from that era to join the group. We are starting to post links to everyone's blogs and other contact info on it; whatever each person wants to share. The biggest reason we need it is to be able to get the word out to everyone quicker via email when something is planned.

We hope to eventually start having get-togethers whether big or small. Some of the girls are already doing that together and that is great. Tim is currently planning something for the guys this fall. It would be fun to eventually have a full blown reunion somewhere, sometime, with anyone who would be interested in coming.

So if you are interested go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/summer96 or just email me at lukelee78@yahoo.com and I will send you an invitation to be on it. If you know of anyone's whereabouts that should be on it or will want to know about it, please let them know or let me know and I will send them an invite.

Sorry to our faithful readers if this was a boring post to you but sometimes that happens. Thanks everyone for reading our blog. I am excited to hear from you.

Poor Parenting

I have enjoyed reading Carin's,Tanya's and Sara's blogs about poor parenting, so I decided to let everyone know about my poor parenting experiences. Rusty is our "no-rules" child. He eats Doritos, Pringles or any kind of "chipies" for breakfast, lunch and most every meal of the day. He also enjoys peeing off the stairs of the second floor onto the sidewalk below. Luckily for me, most of our neighbors are blind, so no one knows what he is doing. He also gets to stay up as long as he wants. But seriously, who could say no to that kid.

Stone eats as many popsicles as he can. He eats them first thing in the morning, before he eats breakfast. We went through a Costco size box of 200 otter pops in less than a month. At least he knows how to get them without any help.

The last couple of weeks Van has begun to smile and giggle a lot. He will even do it randomly just by watching one of us walk by him. He continues to be the most pleasant baby and hardly cries. The past 4 days he has slept for about 9 hours each night. The top 2 and bottom 2 pictures were taken with Luke's Phone.