Camping!!

Yay!  It's Labor Day and we want to go on a family adventure.  How about camping??  So... apparently you have to book a camping site WAY in advance for Labor Day weekend.  Since I did not plan ahead and reserve a spot, we drove up the canyon in search of a great outdoor adventure and ended up changing our destination right back to our good old backyard!  We did stop at a Lowe's and purchased a lovely fire pit for marshmallow roasting.  The backyard turned out to be a hit, despite the close proximity of neighbors and lack of a surrounding wilderness.
I appreciated the close proximity of bathrooms and showers :)
The girls didn't seem to mind in the least bit.  We even cooked tin foil dinners over the fire and dined outside.  Mike did an amazing job setting up the tent and beds.  The girls did their best to help...

Avril sweeps out the dirt inside the tent

She also tries to sweep out McKel...

Two sweet little helpers!

Here is the tent!  Assembled in all its glory!

Our new fire pit!!

The man of the house, hard at work!

Ready to eat some delicious treats!

Goofiness!

More goofiness!

They're just so cute I have to include one more of these two sillies!

Here you can see the girls are clearly ready for bed and to drop off in to a nice, peaceful slumber...

Happy Labor Day!  What an awesome camping experience :)

Some Videos From This Month

The girls got to take private swim lessons up in Logan while they stayed with Nana and Papa during the day.  Here are a few clips of the girls at the Sports Academy taking their lessons:


Nice job girls!  So proud of them :)

And here is a random video of Avril reading a story.  I really think she has to pee the whole time...
And there you have it!  Fun video clips for your viewing pleasure!

Birthday Party Day

Due to tiredness and stress levels of the blog author, this post I will let the pictures speak for themselves, with little or no commentary.  To summarize the day, we went to TWO birthday parties:  Matthew (coworker Sara's little boy), and Chloe (neighbor).  The girls had a blast.

So cute!!

And moving on to Party #2 at Chloe's house- we make friends with the neighbors!:

All partied out!!  Peace out.

Comedians in the Family

Mike sent me this pic of McKel, who got all dressed and ready for school by herself.  So glad she is supporting our race.  Such a cutie!  She loves that Hello Kitty lunchbox that she picked out at the store... has to take it to daycare every single day or its bad news!

I love getting cute picture texts from Mike, like this one.  Makes my day start out bright and happy.

Also... we got to have a date night!!  A couple of my Logan friends invited us to see a comedian in Salt Lake.  Which is perfect, because I am married to a comedian.  So Mike was right at home there.  Mike even got invited to come up on stage and entertain us!  :)  It was a fun night...

Good times!

I don't even have an explanation... hahaha!

Hike to Lake Blanche

A weekend off from kids?  If there is any up side to being divorced, its the free babysitter we get every other weekend.  This weekend we thought a hike sounded like a splendid idea!  Mother Nature thought it would be a splendid idea to have a rain hail storm right at that time.  We kept right on a-trekking.  No wimps here!  And its a good thing we didn't quit, because the sights were incredible.  We even saw a MOOSE!  Mike and I were practicing using our fancy camera again, which I still have SO much to learn about.  I feel completely lost just trying to take a simple picture.  However, we did get some amazing shots.  See for yourself:

The peaceful sounds of the river accompanied us on our hike.

I may have married him for his looks...

Wearing my new handy jacket that was a gift from my hubby.  Good thing we brought it!

Cool tree bridge

Here come the storm clouds...

Water break

Picturesque (cool word)

Some trees...there were a lot of those

I am hard to miss in that jacket

Practicing our focusing skills with the camera...

Photographer was behind me as a I climbed up and up

There he is!

Focusing on the leaves... so cool!

Me admiring something that must've been pretty spectacular...

Practicing focus skills again... focus on the berries...

Focus on the flowers

Focus on the yellow flowers...

peeking through the brush...

I did it!!  I am so proud of this shot, it took lots of practice!  But I DID IT!!!  Figured out how to blur the background... now if only I could figure out how to do it again...

Focused on the background...

We've reached the top!

Woo hoo!

Gorgeous!

Even a waterfall...

Even Mike was cold up there... so we didn't hang around up top for too long...

Cute!

Check out the tree reflections!

Trees.

Pretty.

Snack break.

And on the way back down, we saw this!!:

He was standing right smack dab in the middle of our trail, just munching on the leaves!!

We were quite close to him...

Hello Mr. Moose!

What a fun adventure in nature!  Awesome hike :)  Happy day!  Now to go get warm in a hot bath!