Summer Fun (and not so fun)

We're only one week into summer vacation and already we've had lots of fun. (And a lot more coming too!)

But first let's get the not-so-fun out of the way. The last week of school Aubree had a really bad fever all week long. There were no other symptoms until the third day, when we noticed this rash around her ear. It was really hot to the touch and extremely sensitive. So, I took her to the doctor thinking we may have a case of Lyme Disease. (If I were to choose the number one thing - and possibly the only thing aside from being far away from family - I hate about New England, it would be ticks that carry Lyme Disease.) So, the doctor checks her out and gives her antibiotics for cellulitis (a bacterial skin infection) and the paperwork to get tested for Lyme.

 Here she is after the blood draw for the Lyme test - poor sweetie.

We still don't have the results for the Lyme test, but the antibiotics for cellulitis made all the difference and she is back to normal. (The first dose of antibiotics cost us a lot of sweat and tears and about 30 minutes, but she's gotten very brave at taking her medicine.)

Next not-so-fun item to get out of the way. Three days ago I slipped and fell down a few stairs at our house and I've injured my tailbone. You never realize how connected every part of our body is until a part of it is damaged - it hurts to push or pull with my arms, bend, cough, sneeze, and it especially hurts at night when I'm trying to sleep. I'm a little bit nervous about our trip out west that's coming up - a lot of sitting in planes and cars...
(Unfortunately I don't have a picture of my backside to illustrate this portion of the post.) ;)

Okay, now for the fun stuff.
Miss Mary is the cross-walk lady at the intersection closest to our house. She became my friend and I always looked forward to seeing her each day. On Friday she invited all her cross-walkers to come to her house and enjoy her pool. We had such a great time!

 Isabelle, Aubree, Miss Mary, Carly, Ellie, Samantha, and Simron

After Aubree learned to ride her two-wheeler, Miss Mary gave her these streamers for her bike handles.

We went to the Chorus of Westerly Summer Pops concert in the park last Saturday. There are about 25,000 people at the park for a wonderful concert. They did a sing-along with the audience to a medley of the Sound of Music songs. At the very end the whole audience sings the national anthem with fireworks going off and the Newport artillery firing. It brings out my American pride and gives me the chills!

Now that our mornings are a bit more relaxed, we actually have the time to really get our zones done each day and so the house has actually been cleaner since the girls have been out of school.

An evening at Misquamicut beach with the Garrett's and Jensen's.

Right now we are at our "vacation home" (the West's home) in Mystic. The girls absolutely LOVE being here. (Pictures coming up in a future blog post.)

Spring Break

 Way back in the fall Ellie found a bunch of misplaced bulbs and planted them in the backyard by our lilac bush. We kinda forgot all about it until the end of March when we started to see little green shoots coming out of the ground. So Ellie made a nice rock border and a few weeks later we had beautiful daffodils. What a wonderful Spring surprise! Ellie loves the outdoors and gardening.

 As always, we LOVED General Conference. I saw this idea on Pinterest for making a Conference board where you can keep track of the speakers and their topics (and some other stuff), so I spent a lot of time making it (and even bought a laminator). The girls liked it, but we really didn't use it much. The thing we all really enjoyed, aside from the talks, was the bag of candy assigned to each apostle that we would open at the beginning of their talk. :) We consumed so much sugar within those two days!

 We spent our spring break at the West's house... house-, dog- and hamster-sitting. As with every other time we've done this, it was super fun for the girls, but by the end of the week I was SO ready to be back in my own home (even if it is 1/5 the size and 100+ years older)!

Ellie + Mommy = LOVE

 We went to a beach in Niantic after spending some time at the Book Barns and a fabulous 50's candy shop (where we spent WAY too much money on junk).

 We had the missionaries over for dinner and our Sister States (not pictured) was on splits with her sister trainer, Sister Jones (pictured above). Aaron asked Sister Jones where she was from and she said Wyoming. She is from a tiny little town called Otto right by Burlington, WY (the town that my parents grew up in). I told her we were probably related (because I'm related to most people in that little area), and lo and behold WE ARE!!! It was so cool to meet my (distant) cousin out here in CT!

 Carly loved practicing back flips and back handsprings on the West's trampoline. She's such a good little gymnast.

 Sandy + Aubree = nervous love

(We love Aubree's glamour smiles)

 We went to Devil's Hopyard, a state park just 40 minutes away, and enjoyed the waterfall and other beautiful scenery of new spring.

 I love the vibrant green of the moss that grows on everything!

Aaron + Camile = LOVE!

Random pictures

We went to the Washington County Fair in August. I did not realize what a rip off fairs are around here. We paid $20 dollars to get in, then another $20 for the girls to do this ride (pictured below) two times!! After spending that $40, we didn't feel like spending any more for food. 

 It was pretty hot and the girls were NOT very happy about their choices in rides (considering the money and height restrictions), so this is a good picture of the overall attitude:

BUT (this is the highlight of the fair), we participated in the egg toss competition and Aaron and I won third place!! We got ribbons and $2 - woo hoo! (which almost made the fair worth it .... almost.)

Girls playing in the hot weather with our neighbor

Aubree and her friend Aiden playing battleship. They basically just do designs with the pegs and pretend they're playing the game.

What Aaron would look like with a mustache:

Girls and I at the Providence Children's Museum

 Midget pictures at the museum:

 The girls wanted to have a little tea party with the tea set Nanny Nette gave Aubree for her last birthday. They had s'mores with their tea.

We watched our friend's kids while they went to the temple, and the kids did some yard work for us.

These little girls played and played with the chalk until their clothes were totally covered in chalk.

Aubree and I went to the Westerly Farmers Market. Our family used to love to go to the Farmer's Market in Moscow, but we haven't really been to one since. This one was really tiny, but still kind of fun to see all the local produce.

Little Miss Polka Dot:

At our bus stop there are about 12 girls that wait for the bus and no boys!

Family happenings

 Now that we're in our little branch we get to have the missionaries over for dinner every week. Here we are with Sister Blair and Sister Preszlar. Sister Blair's first name is Christine, but she told me that her sister and a lot of other people call her Camile. Totally random, but pretty cool - Camile is a good name.

 The girls have been taking karate lessons. I just about die whenever I see Aubree in her little outfit doing her karate moves! (She is quite possibly the cutest human being on earth... in my humble opinion.)

 Nanny Nette sent Aubree some makeup when she found out that Aubree was always sneaking my makeup. (Stephanie and I used to have a hard time sharing our makeup and we would fight about it. I guess with three girls I'll finally have to learn to share my makeup - I was just hoping to wait a few more years.)

 Last time we went to the temple we went to Walden Pond. It was only a 12 minute drive away - so we will definitely be doing this again. Here we are in a replica of Henry David Thoreau's home. I read part of Walden Pond a few years ago, so it was really neat for me to be there.

 Me and my man Thoreau

 Walden Pond - we all LOVED being there! The girls thought it was nice to swim in fresh water and I loved being somewhere so historical and beautiful.

 Mystic Y beach - one of the only free beaches I've found in our area.

 The girls went to their first vacation bible school (VBS) last week and had a fabulous time! There are VBS's pretty much every week of the summer put on by different churches in the community. I chose the Baptist church that my friend goes to and was really happy with how they organized it and what a positive experience it was for the girls. I think it was a good way for them to see the positive things in other churches and how much we have in common. And last but not least (in fact probably top of my reasons why) I also enjoyed having a free break for three hours every day - unfortunately I got very little accomplished.

Aubree won these cool sunglasses at VBS.

 Aubree and her friend at the VBS BBQ.

 The Mormons, the Catholics and the Baptists at the BBQ

 Playing Apples to Apples. Aubree would just choose random cards from her pile and she ended up winning by a landslide.

 I taught Carly and Ellie how to hand stitch some little dresses for their stuffed animals. Here's Carly's end product.

This is what Aubree would look like with bangs.

When I saw these at the candy store it brought back happy memories of when my Dad would come home from a business trip and bring us Neccos.

Phone Photo Updates

Our camera is lost (as well as my gym shoes and sweats and two shirts of the girls' - I think they've all disappeared to the same place, but I don't know where that is). So, I've been using my phone to take pictures. Here's our life lately - in low definition (maybe I should make all the pictures square to look like instagram photos and then it will actually be cool instead of low-quality).

 Aubree's legs are finally long enough to reach the pedals on her trike and bike. Maybe the training wheels will come off her bike this summer. Aubree is usually found with a backpack or purse of some kind. She fills it up with bows, coloring supplies, books, and a spare pair of panties.

 Carly (below) and Ellie (above) had their spring concert for school.

 Almost every time we go to the Boston Temple we go to this park a couple miles away. Last time we spent about 5 hours at the park! We've only actually been in the town of Boston once or twice (the temple is in Belmont) but I just love the Boston area and I'm so glad our temple is there so we get to go there every month or two.

We have a membership at the YMCA and they were offering a free family Taekwondo class this spring term. (This is a phone photo courtesy of Aubree.) The girls have always wanted to try some form of martial arts, so we thought this would be a good way to try it out ... for free! I'm glad we did this free class, because come to find out, the girls don't really like it all that much. But we're going to stick it out through the whole term - today is our last class. One thing is for sure - learning a new skill usually isn't very fun until you get good at it.

 My parents moved out of my childhood home (another post about that coming soon - I hope) over Memorial Day weekend. I was so sad I couldn't be there so we decided to make our Memorial Day busy and fun so I wouldn't have to think about not being at home. We went to the beach (and drove past Taylor Swift's new home), had a BBQ, and watched What About Bob. It was a fun day.

 Chocolate Harvest Cake. I've had the recipe for this cake sitting in a folder for about two years. Even though it's definitely a fall recipe, I was finally feeling the motivation and craving to make it. Isn't it pretty? It was yummy too - but I think I'll wait until fall to make it again ... in about two years. :)

 Ellie had her dance recital. This was her first year doing dance - she and Carly have always done gymnastics in the past (and Carly stuck with gymnastics this year). So, this was the first dance recital I had been to in a long time. It brought back such great memories of when I was in dance. I loved the the excitement and nervousness and rush of adrenaline that came with performing. The end of the year recital was always so fun - it felt laid back because it wasn't a competition, and a little bittersweet because it was the last performance of the year.

 Another beach day with Aubree while the big girls were at school.

 Carly and Ellie have made about 47 of these fortune teller thingys - this is one of the miniature ones. So far it has been foretold that I will live to be 100, I will win something soon, and I will fail in a school project.

 A few months ago Ellie stuck a branch in the ground to trick me into thinking a tree was growing there. After she took the branch out they continued to mess around with the little hole making it bigger and bigger - big enough that they could stick their entire leg into it. Finally a few weeks later Aaron decided to fill up the little hole they made and when he put a shovelful of dirt in it, the dirt just whoosh - disappeared out of site. It was then that we realized the girls hadn't made the hole, but actually discovered a much bigger hole in our backyard. When the excavator came he told us it was the old septic hole - about 5 feet across and 9 feet deep. Well, he covered it up and we are so grateful that the girls didn't ever fall in and get hurt.