Grandpa Retires!

Grandpa retired from driving truck yesterday. We went over and had dinner and a little celebration. Grandpa looked so happy when he walked in. We are really excited for him. Congratulations Timm! I love you! (the cake says All Done, and yes Violet did take a piece before we did the candles).

V sang happy Birthday, the rest of us just cheered.

Violet of course helped blow out the candles, she is going to be super excited when we have b-day cake for grandpa in about a week. All day she talked about grandpa and his big cake, she was so excited.

We need to get those last few!

Yay! we did it!

After dinner and cake we just let the kids run out their energy and they played with the balloons that grandpa brought home, it was such a wonderful night and we had a lot of fun celebrating grandpa's retirement. Up Next: The Wood Family is coming to town!!!! we are all so EXCITED!!!!

Rain Rain go away....

It must be getting to be Autumn because I have been baking a lot. I found a wonderful recipe in an old cookbook I got in college. Our institute director/Stake president used to make us bread and I remember it was so wonderful. I was really excited when I found my little yellow cookbook that had President Youngberg's bread recipe in it. yum. the kitchen smelled amazing!

I have also been experimenting with some of the ingredients in the back of the pantry/fridge/freezer (don't worry I make sure they are still fresh before I use them) The other day I found a bag of frozen berries from costco that had about a cup of berries left, so I thawed them out with a little sugar on the stove and mixed them into our pancake mix. Peter did the dishes after this experiment and he said he loved the pancakes but hated the blue pancake batter. Next time I'll take dishes duty.

The weather has been changing too. We went down to the park today to get some energy out and we were only able to stay about half hour before the rain started :( thank goodness the mall playground is indoors and just up the street.

Claire at the park. Loving it!
Violet pushing Claire on the swing.

They both quickly turned their heads to see a doggy! the owner was nice enough to let Violet play fetch with the dog for a few minutes. She had so much fun and the doggy got quite a workout.

Claire may be an adventurer at home but the big kid slide proved to be too big for her. She inched her way down that slide little by little and was so happy when she made it to the bottom. Good work Claire!

Violet prefers the tube slide.

Ok so I have a funny story. Kids keep you guessing all the time and everyday there is something to laugh about. Well I put the girls in their room. The room was clean the they were both fully dressed and on the floor playing nicely, so I went to fix some lunch. A few moments later I hear "help Mommy! Help me!" I figured Claire had just stolen a toy or something but when I walked into the room this is what I saw......

The picture doesn't do the scene justice...every toy, book and article of clothing is on the floor. Violet is of course sitting on top of her toy rack that was previously full of baskets of toys. Have a good laugh, we will be picking up toys after nap time :)

Date list

A couple of people have asked for the list I used for my Jug o dates. You can download it at this link:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/37066754/Jug-o-dates

Grandpa's b-day party

Grandpa Cecil had a birthday party today. The entire Wright side of the family got together for dinner and birthday cake. It was a fun time to catch up and visit.

Violet and Olivia love to get together and play with the babies. They helped grandpa blow out his candles. What goofs!

Violet rocking the baby.

Claire loves the babies also and she found one that was just her size.

It's a little difficult to get a good focus in the rain, but Violet loved playing in the puddles today and she was soaked by the time we got her in the car to go home.

Winding down summer

Well Summer is winding down, we have had so much fun this summer. The last few weeks we have just been enjoying the last of the sunny weather. Claire got to celebrate her birthday twice this year! Once with the Corier's and once with the Wright family. She only got to destroy a whole cake once though so the Wright family had to settle for just watching her demolish a big piece of the cake....of course she loved it :)

Claire got a little ride on car from Grandma and Grandpa, she loves it, it makes all sorts of sounds and doubles as a play house for some little people. The demonstration batteries have died and I haven't picked up any more yet so it is a quiet pink car....for now.

Princess Claire swinging at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

Claire is taking on toddler hood with full force and not only is she walking all over the place, she is climbing on everything (like the table) and finding all sorts of things she should not be into. Thank goodness she was unsuccessful in getting the hot sauce bottle open!

Violet and Claire "reading" the phone book. I haven't used a phone book in a long time (I am a huge internet fan) and for some reason we had 3 copies dropped off on our front porch last week, the girls enjoyed playing with them and and I didn't have to worry about them ripping the pages out. Maybe I'll let them color on one of the extra copies.

I love this picture. Claire is just in love with this little doll.

On saturday Peter and I took the girls over to Dave and Mary's house for a lunch with them and some of their friends. We had a great time. Mary had been clothes shopping for the girls and as soon as Mary brought out the outfit she bought for Violet, V stripped down and tried on her new purple tu tu outfit...she loves it. Mary also gave the girls these dolls that are called Groovy girls, they are really cute and the girls think they are great.

Violet is our little artist, all of our walls have little pen marks from her constant need to color and I try to keep up with her need to create pictures with tons of crayons, markers, paints, stickers and all sorts of fun craft things. On sunday Violet painted a watercolor picture, she also painted her face and I just discovered that she painted her toes too. Everything is a canvas for that girl.

Claire is cutting some teeth and this is the face that greets me more often than I would like...poor baby. won't it be nice when she is done teething.

School starts this week and even though neither of my kids are school age I have definitely noticed. Crayons were 25 cents a box at target (we stock up on art supplies) and my primary class is full of kids starting kindergarten and first grade and they were all nuts today! They were so wound up and tense, they don't want to have summer end. The whole primary was just a mad house today, I think the kids are all nervous about the new school year and anxious to get back into a routine. Well, it's been a great summer and I'm so excited for the fall and winter. It's going to be a fun holiday season. Love to you all!