We’ve been reminiscing a lot about last summer and how nuts it was and I am SO thankful we aren’t reliving it this year!! We’ve been busy but NOTHING like last year.

Nathan has been practicing his weird headstand tricks constantly. He’s nuts. And it makes my neck hurt to watch him.

Junie turned three and we celebrated Minnie Mouse style. Eisley thought she’d died and gone to heaven. 😉

Love this!!

Sweet, sweet friends. Parker tells me often that Junie is his bestest friend. 😉

We took the next morning off work and took the kids hiking down by the Bosque. The boys were SO ridiculously happy.

Little Miss was not so ridiculously happy since she had to ride in the carrier for the most part instead of walking around like the boys. 😉

Three happy littles on a log.

I feel like this picture accurately describes our summer. 😉 Lots of playing, lots of fun, lots of kids who can’t keep their eyes open at the end of the fun. 😉

We took advantage of Jon working from home to go get iced coffee during the kids’ rest time. Love this!

Needless to say, Eisley has been known to get away with murder when it comes to her dad. Particularly when she’s wearing her hair in pigtails. 😉

She plopped in his lap to watch Wild Kratts and it was the highlight of his whole day.

Love summer family dinner nights – the kids run themselves tired outside at Gammy and Pops’ house and then finish up the evening with ice cream. It’s the best time of the year!

Hi everyone!!

I really hope you’ve been enjoying our little summer book club!! We are meeting TOMORROW, on my Erynn Mangum page on Facebook Live at 10AM MST (which is 9AM Pacific time, 11AM Central time, 12PM Eastern Time).

We’ll be discussing The Negotiator, so bring your book, grab a cup of coffee and join us!!

Can’t wait to see you tomorrow!!

For Father’s Day, we gave Pops some new pictures for his office, because 90% of them are before Parker and Eisley were even around. 😉 So, it was time for some updated shots.

I’ve said it before, but Nathan’s super power is totally smiling for the camera. He’s excelled at this since he was eight weeks old. 😉 Rarely does it take longer than about three seconds to get ten perfect pictures of him.

Parker does not share that same talent. 😉 Ha! He takes a lot more convincing. I usually have some pretty fantastic outtakes of him.

And Eisley DEFINITELY doesn’t share that talent. We can only get her to look at the camera and smile if all the stars align and the four of us are all acting like circus clowns. Ha!

The outtakes:

This one cracks me up because this was her reaction when a hummingbird flew by. Ha!

Goodness, I love these kids.

We had a nice, low-key Father’s Day celebrating our Jon. 🙂

The boys made cards for him and were so excited to give them to him!

We gave him his cards and then took him out to a Father’s Day brunch at his favorite breakfast restaurant. 🙂

Eisley is SUCH a daddy’s girl it’s not even funny. Someone is going to have a terrible time when Jon goes back to regular hours in the fall.

The Tuesday after Father’s Day, we sold my car! We’ve been looking at bigger cars since Eisley was born but never could quite pull the trigger. Finally, we decided to list it this summer since Jon’s schedule was a little more conducive to us only having one car for awhile, if we had a long gap between having two cars again.

On Wednesday, we went to go look at a used Kia Sedona and ended up buying it the same day. 😉 Ha! Not a long wait at all! We were so thankful! We didn’t tell the kids until we went to “pick up” Jon from the dealer and this was Nathan’s reaction:

Ha! We will see if he has this same reaction when he’s sixteen and finds out he gets to drive the van for his first car. 😉

I protested the minivan for YEARS and now, I’m actually kind of really enjoying it. 😉 It’s so nice to have a little more room and it’s REALLY nice for Nathan to not have to climb through the hatch. And, we went to Costco and no one had to hold anything on their laps on the way home. Ha!

Photo credit: Parker. 🙂

I heard the balloon when I was up trying to get some work done early in the morning and so I ran and got the boys out of their room. They ran out on the deck. You know they are close when the balloonists are calling, “Good morning!” as they float by. Ha!

Front facing cameras should not be allowed in a house with small boys. Weirdos. 😉

I’m so excited for you guys to meet Amelia, Landon and Joe!

You can read more about Swing Lowe and pre-order your very own copy here!

As a reminder, the Kindle app is absolutely FREE and you can read it on any phone or tablet. It will also be available on Nook and Kobo on July 17th!

Thank you all so much!!!

Swim lessons continued this whole week!

Warming up to the water again on Sunday at family dinner at Gammy and Pops’ house. 😉

It must have worked, because this Little Miss went from HATING swim lessons to LOVING swim lessons! Ha!

Such a cheesy girl! We were so happy!

Nathan has always and likely will always love swimming. He’s good at it too! When he settled down and focused, he did fantastic.

I couldn’t get a good picture of Parker the Blur during lessons, but after the last day on Friday, this guy was TOAST. I even had a call into our pediatrician because I was so worried about him – he slept for almost three hours in about four different locations all over our house as we tried to get him up. 😉 Poor little man. Swimming every day for two weeks straight is hard!!

(Edited to add: If you checked this post earlier, I’ve changed the book due to a few concerns and reviews. So, new book!)

So so excited for this!!

I have been going over potential books for forever and after MUCH debate, I think I’m going to go with an oldie but a goodie. 😉 So without further ado…

The Negotiator by Dee Henderson!! I first read this book in college and it totally hooked my attention! It’s been a LONG time since I’ve read it and if you haven’t ever read Dee Henderson’s O’Malley series, you should just go ahead and set aside some of your summer money to buy the rest of the series. 😉

Right now, it’s about $8 for either the paperback or Kindle on Amazon!

As far as a timeline goes, let’s all have it read by July 1st and I’ll have a definite time for you soon, but on that day I’ll do a Facebook Live chat (and FUN – I think I’ve convinced my mom to join me for it!). So have your book read and a cup of coffee ready and we can all pretend we are in the same room. 🙂

So excited to hear what you think!!

 

We haven’t hardly sat down, so I guess that explains the speed of the days, but I cannot remember a faster summer. And here we thought this summer would be all easy-going. 😉

We knew we wanted to do some major work on our yard this summer. When we bought our house a year ago (HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE), we had saved up a bit of money to use for the backyard and ended up spending it in the kitchen. So, we’ve been using our spare time over the year to simplify as much as we could in the yard.

Earlier in the week, my friend Eryn texted me and told me they were bringing lunch and Thomas was going to help Jon in the yard. We saw our friends Jamie and Justin at church and they were like, “We’re coming too!”

Our dear friends. These kids have been friends since before most of them were born. 😉 Love how they all crammed onto one tiny table still.

The guys worked the entire afternoon and got our gazebo completely out and a lot of the lava rock around it!! It was in really sorry shape and we decided it would be better to just take it down since all it did was attract all kinds of spiders and wasps and little friends. Jon and I were just so overwhelmed that night – our friends are so wonderful to us! God has blessed us so so much with them.

Monday morning, Nathan had his orthopedic appointment and swim lessons started. Busy morning! Gammy and Cayce went with me and Nathan and Pops went with Jon and the other kids to the swim lessons. And great news! We found out Nathan’s arm wasn’t actually broken – he had joint effusion (basically swelling) which often happens with hairline breaks so urgent care likely casted him just to be safe. The doctor said he didn’t need a cast and he could even go to swim lessons!

So we ran home real fast, grabbed Nathan’s suit and happened to make it right as the lessons were starting. 😉

Three little cuties – Nathan and Parker LOVED it. Eisley was not really a fan. 😉

I asked her where her belly button was and she couldn’t find it and then looked up at me like this. Ha! I was laughing so hard!

She was super attached to this Minnie Mouse that day. She shared her snack with her and everything. Ha!

Swim lessons plus playing outside plus summertime has made this kid very, very, very tired (and grouchy) most afternoons. Jon was working and Parker just climbed in his lap and fell asleep.

Friday, we started taking down the shed and Saturday, our friends all showed back up (with lunch again!) and finished the job and took 6 truckloads of stuff to the dump. They are amazing. Seriously, Jon and I are just so incredibly blessed.

Little Miss is cutting a back tooth and has been pretty sad about it, so we made some cookies and medicated with some cookie dough covered beaters and ibuprofen. Nothing like a little cold metal covered with delicious to make teething feel better. 😉

Stay tuned for the book club book coming soon!!

 

First off, YAY. I am so excited to hear y’all are up for a little book club! Let me think through the options and I’ll do a post this week with some ideas. 🙂

On Saturday, Aunt Nicole and Hudson came in town for a little bit while Uncle Caleb was off doing a dental mission trip in Jamaica. So fun to see them!

Eisley was a super big grouch the whole day on Saturday and Saturday night, she started running a 103 degree fever right at dinner time. She ran one Sunday and woke up with one on Monday and just looked miserable, so I took her in to the pediatric urgent care Monday morning and we found out she had strep.

Poor sweet girl. She was just so sad. She finally started to feel a little bit better Monday night with the antibiotics and after a four hour nap, but I’ve never seen her so sick before. It totally broke our hearts.

She finally started feeling better and we got to see Nicole and Hudson Tuesday night before they left. Then, yesterday, Nathan was running through the house (something he’s not supposed to do), slipped on the kitchen floor, caught himself weird and immediately started screaming.

When he was still crying off and on 20 minutes later, I knew it was bad so I took him right to urgent care. They did x-rays (which were AWFUL. He was sobbing, I was crying, it was awful) and the first doctor didn’t seen anything but the radiologist decided he had a fracture.

SO sad!! We made it almost seven years without a break. I don’t think I really processed what happened until he went to bed last night and then I just couldn’t get over it. 🙁 He’s doing okay – right now, the cast is still kind of cool to him but I have a feeling that sentiment is going to end pretty quickly.

He’s in a temporary cast until Monday which was the first appointment the orthopedic doctor had available. Since it’s not a permanent cast, he was told to sit down and watch Netflix for the next few days since this cast isn’t as stabilizing (or as water-resistant) as a permanent cast. Looks like we might have a long weekend ahead. 🙁 So thankful though – if he had to break an arm, I’m very thankful it was his left and not his right.

In other words, Mom is sort of all-done-urgent-care around here and I’m totally turning into that mother on Little Giants and wrapping all three kids in bubble wrap for the forseeable future.