The last week of the "party"

Our last week of summer Zac went to scout camp.  Tom spent 3 days with him and it was just the other 4 kids and me at home.  Zac had a great time at scout camp and I was glad Tom went so I really knew what happened.  Zac isn't much of a talker about things that go on.  They went to a camp at Bear Lake and did lots of water activities.  Zac loves camping (he gets that from Tom) but I think he was ready to come home by the end of it.   

At home one morning I found Abbi and Gavin watching her ipod on her bed.  Notice Gavin is playing with Abbi's hair of course.  These two can really get along when they want to.  Well, or when Abbi lets Gavin play with her hair.  

One of the most exciting parts of the week was Carter and Gavin got "Dash"!  They love to play Disney Infinity on our wii and Carter had $10 he earned.  We ordered Dash on amazon (of course) and waiting the 2 days for it to get here was hard.  They were so excited when he came.  (As I took this picture I told Carter to look up a bit.  He explained to me that his smile looks better if he looks down a bit. Huh??? Funny kid.)

After our last day of swimming lessons I took the kids to get a Hawaiian snow cone.  They were huge with ice cream in the middle (optional but yummy) and even with sweetened condensed milk on the top too (once again optional and extra but I had to try it).  Unfortunately this day was so hot!  It was 100 degrees as we sat at that little table with a little umbrella.  The snow cones melted all over the table as we ate and I just couldn't wait to get back in the air conditioned car!

Gavin didn't want his picture taken (this is common).

We got our first fruits of Tom's labor from our garden.  Lucky for me Tom does all the gardening around here.  He loves it.  Sometimes too much and plants too much.  I always look forward to the tomatoes especially.  Garden tomatoes have ruined me and I never buy them from the store anymore because the taste is horrible.  So this time of year is basically the only time I eat tomatoes.

We bought some perler beads and tried making different things.  Gavin wanted a Captain America and his shield.  Carter made him the Captain America and I made the shield.  

In an attempt to be a fun mom I bought some thick plastic at walmart, spent some time ironing the edges together (with some wax paper on top) and we made a water blob!  (Google it or pinterest it if you want to know more).  We filled it with some water, duct taped the hole and the kids played on it for the day.  And my kids still say we never do anything fun....

On the 24th of July we had nothing to do.  Usually we go to my parent's house for a BBQ and fireworks but that wasn't happening.  All day my kids kept bugging me about what we were doing.  Blake has started going to be bed fairly early so going somewhere would have been difficult.  Tom had to work so that didn't help.  We had some pop its leftover from the 4th of July so the kids went out and did them.  We ordered some pizza and Blake tried out the Bumbo on the table for the first time (don't worry we don't leave him unattended like that) and then we watched the new American Girl movie, Isabelle that we rented from Redbox.  What a way to celebrate those pioneers!

 My brother Scott and his wife Melissa had their 5th baby over the weekend so we had to go visit Baby Sloan.  She is a sweet little thing.  I knew Blake would look huge compared to her but it's still crazy how big he is.  He's still such a baby to me.  Oh I love him.  Scott and Melissa didn't know the gender until Sloan was born so I was hoping for a boy to be a playmate for Blake.  I guess he can be subjected to some tea parties in the future.  

This picture makes me laugh as they look like they are concocting an evil plan.

 Carter spends most of his days doing this--

 If you know Carter he only deals in obsessions.  This is his latest obsession-- comic books.  Well, one of them.  His other would be the weather.  He has about 20 comic books checked out from the library.  Mostly Garfield but also Big Nate and Calvin and Hobbes.  The kid is reading them ALL THE TIME.  I can't get him to read anything else.  I stopped trying.  And there are a lot of Garfield books to check out.  A lot.  So we'll see how long this obsession lasts.  He's always been a book kid but now he's just a comic book kid.  Like I said, he's also obsessed with the weather.  He loves checking my weather app on my phone.  I have it set to show the weather in a few different places- home, St. George, Las Vegas, Anaheim, Phoenix, and Mongolia.  He'll check them, compare them, look at them in Celcius, be interested in the rain predictions, wish we lived somewhere else, etc.  One day we had a 100% rain for 4:00 in the afternoon.  It was 3:30 and did not look like rain at all.  He stared out the window waiting for the rain.  100% means 100% to him.  It didn't rain and luckily he forgot about it.  He is always wanting to add a new place to my weather app.  He just can't get enough.  But he's discovered he can ask Siri on my phone for the weather in different places.  He'll ask for the weather in as many places as he can think of-- Death Valley, India, Chad, Canada, etc and if he hears of another place in the world he wants to check its weather on my phone.

Tom had some smoke bombs and the kids wanted to light them.  Our microwave broke a couple weeks ago and some guy was supposed to come pick it up.  We left it on the curb for him and he didn't come, we called him, he didn't come so we looked very white trash for a week.  Tom just lit the smoke bombs on that. The kids thought they were great.  Obviously we don't light fireworks much.

And with that our summer is over!