This Week

Please excuse me once again for this long, rambling blog of completely unrelated topics! My sister's wedding is next weekend, our bachelorette excursion to Lake Tahoe is tomorrow, my in-laws are coming to stay with us next week, and I haven't even started to think about composing my wedding speech yet! I have been completely inundated with wedding projects and back-to-school committments (Sawyer's school has had two parent education workshops and they've sent home THREE fundraisers in this first month of school!)...so please, pardon me if my photos and thoughts are a bit scattered. I promise that after next weekend I'll try to get my act together and start blogging on a more consistent and cohesive basis :)


In keeping with his obsessions with all things puppy and fireman related, Sawyer is going to be a dalmatian for Halloween. Now, let's just hope that it's not still 100 degrees next month, because this costume is fuzzy and H-O-T!


The boys had fun making this fall leaf craft that was posted on Frugal Family Fun Blog.


Since (as you can see in the background!) we don't really have any big trees in this new subdivision yet, I love that their suncatchers add a bit of much-needed fall color around here!

After several weeks of working hard to completely fill his star chart, Sawyer finally had enough "best behavior" stars to earn his Imaginext ambulance! He would barely hold still for me to get a picture of him playing with it!

Daddy used a bunch of cardboard sheets and packing tape to transform the boys into robots.

Oh yeah, all that cardboard came from this...

...our new kitchen dining set! This new set has a leaf and six chairs so that there's room for guests to eat dinner at the table with us instead of having to sit at the bar. Yippee! We'll typically keep it with four chairs and without the leaf (so that it's a circle instead of an oval), but since we're having visitors next week, we decided to leave it extended for now. It's SO nice not to have to clean fingerprints off of a glass table 56,234 times a day!

I finally finished Kari and Joe's wedding card box! It is also going to have wired pearl drops that cascade and fall like a firework explosion from the top when we do the final set up, but this is the basic idea :)

I printed out the alphabet in a dashed font, laminated it and gave one to each of the boys along with some dry erase markers. Sutton really likes tracing the letters, and Sawyer is starting to tell me "I for Igloo...G for Gift...Z for Zipper" as he copies over his letters.

Oh, and about those fundraisers...if anyone feels like donating to Sawyer's Trike-a-Thon to benefit the St. Jude Childrens Hospital, you know where to find me ;)

Health & Safety Faire

Today Holly and I took Hattie and the boys to the Placer County Health & Safety Faire in Loomis. When we got there we realized right away that this event was WAY bigger and more crowded than we had anticipated. In fact, we had to take the very last two parking spots alongside a fence in an overflow parking area quite a bit away from the festivities. It was hot outside, and the kids were anxious to get there, but once we walked up to all the booths and tents, we saw that it was also a lot more FUN than we thought it was going to be! I had imagined that there would be a few emergency and rescue vehicles for the kids to tour, but in reality there was SO much more to do. We:

• Had healthy snacks from the free snack area (they had big bags of apples, carrots, string cheese, yogurts, mini water bottles and more) while dancing to “B-I-N-G-O” in the live music area for a few minutes.

• “Shopped” at the farmer’s market: the kids each got a paper bag and some play money to exchange for a real piece of fruit and some stickers from the market cashier.

• Made a whole bunch of craft projects: sand art necklaces, beaded bracelets, fall wreaths, car and star collages, and our own mini books with stamped covers. I had no idea there would be so many projects for the kids to do - it was great!

• Got to check out up close: two different fire engines, an ambulance, and a police car. The boys checked out the inside of the ambulance, but we skipped the interior tour of the fire engine since the line was super long (not to mention that we just went inside the fire engine at the fair a couple of weeks ago). We also got to get up close and personal with a police horse, who promptly sneezed all over the kids and freaked Sutton out!

• Met and took pictures with Smokey the Bear and the Firehouse Mouse. We also got to see two guide dogs and a bunch of baby chicks.

• Spun the kids’ prize wheel and won a pair of star shaped sunglasses and a smiley face pen-on-a-necklace. They also got “Slow For the Cone Zone” tattoos, a couple of rhyme books, a toothbrush/paste/floss set, a couple of coloring books with crayons and stickers galore! By the time we left I had five big bags stuffed full of goodies!

There was actually a lot more that we could have done if the boys and I hadn’t been too hot and impatient to wait in line (including free train rides and a couple more craft stations), but I’d say we got our fill of the Safety Faire anyway. Holly took most of the pictures today since my hands were full with two boys running in different directions and all those above mentioned bags of crap fun goodies, so I’ll post more pictures later if she has any good ones :)









Sawyer was actually having fun (I promise!), but here he was busy complaining about how hot it was outside and how he wanted to sit and drink his water bottle instead of taking another picture of him in a fireman hat LOL








Awww, baby chicks are so cute!

Our patio cover is up, and we LOVE it! We went with an aluminum cover that is embossed to look like wood - it will require very little maintenance, and we were able to get it for an amazingly good price thanks to our neighbors (whose brother owns the patio cover company). It only took them a day to install it, and then it rained that night so we got to experience what rain sounds like on the aluminum. It's a little loud when you're downstairs, but it's really has a pleasant sound to it, and it's not actually any louder than the sound of the rain beating against the windows. We chose a color called cameo that blends nicely with our house colors, but doesn't blind you in the sun like a bright white cover would have. It's 10' tall so it doesn't block much of the view from the house, and it feels incredibly spacious when you're sitting underneath it. It's completely changed the way our backyard feels!


The boys love having a shady place to sit and play now!


This picture was taken before Mitch boxed up all the pre-wiring that we had them do - eventually some day we will add two ceiling fans and sconce lights on the posts.

These two are mastering the art of making goofy faces for the camera these days.

Sawyer bought himself a dinosaur "excavating" kit from the dollar store. It's essentially a big egg-shape made out of something sort of like chalk with seven teeny tiny little dinosaur bones stuck into it. It came with a paintbrush and a poker tool so that you can find the bones and then assemble them into a dinosaur. He was SO focused and into his work...

...it was pretty tough, so eventually he broke down and asked Daddy for some help. (Sutton took this picture)

After about an hour of digging and prodding, we were able to assemble the world's smallest T-Rex skeleton. Seriously, do you have any idea how long it took them to find those miniscule little arms amongst the chunks of chalk!?!

I love being able to go outside and pick fresh veggies for dinner :)

Sutton used the automatic juicer to squeeze some lemons for homemade lemonade. We discovered that the secret to making "the best lemonade ever" is to pre-boil the sugar with a cup of water to make a simple syrup instead of just trying to add straight granulated sugar to the lemonade. Good to know!


We stopped by Toys R Us and Sutton fell in love with this race car driver costume. It's made entirely of thick fleecy sweatshirt material which was a stark contrast to the other costumes that were so thin and flimsy that the kids would definitely rip them if they stepped into them the wrong way. Surprisingly, most of those "cheap" costumes were at least $20-30, and this one was only $15 (and I had a $3 birthday gift card still waiting to be used - can't beat a good quality costume for only $12!)! I ordered him a Lighting McQueen baseball cap off of Ebay to go with it. I'm definitely not going to put myself through the stress of making the boys their Halloween costumes this year!

We also had our community garage sale over the weekend. It went just well enough to have been worth the effort, but it was a huge disappointment over the previous garage sales we've had (the fact that it was raining AGAIN didn't help the situation!). Our area is just too remote to draw in enough customers, so we're going to have a spring sale at my parents' house since we still have almost half of our stuff left to sell. Fortunately, we sold almost all of the big items, so Mitch doesn't have to devote too much of his garage space to storing old baby items anymore :)

California State Fair

Today we visited the California State Fair with Aunt Jessi, Uncle Erik and Stella, and we had SO much fun!

We saw lots of animals - big, small, furry, slimy, snuggly and creepy-crawly...you name it, we probably saw it today!

Sutton was the only one brave enough to touch this giant carp. He said it it felt "slimy like a fish."

We toured through the farm area and filled in our farm passport with stamps from the different areas. When we had collected all of our stamps we took it back to the booth in exchange for a healthy snack for the whole family. The boys chose milk and huge shiny red apples, and Mitch and I shared a pear and some walnuts. I was super excited to order a 10-pound Farm Fresh box of organic fruit/veggies to be delivered to our house later this week for only $13! I've always wanted to try their service, and this week's selection was chock full of things we are running low on...at such a great discounted fair rate, I couldn't pass it up! :)

After the farm tour, the grown-ups sat down to do a little wine tasting while the kids finished up their snacks.

Then we walked through a few of the exhibits and the outdoor garden area. Everwhere you turned around there were people snapping pictures against the beautiful backdrop, but try as I might, these two just could NOT keep a straight face!

With a lot of coaxing from Uncle Erik, Sutton finally managed to give me ONE picture where he wasn't making a silly face!

The boys jumped at the chance to explore the inside and outside of a fire engine -the firefighters even let them pretend to use the fire hoses. Those things were really heavy!

Mitch & Sawyer took a spin around the track for awhile in a go kart. It looked like a ton of fun!

Poor Sutton wanted to ride the go karts too, but he wasn't tall enough. He kept making his pouty face and saying "I'm not too little. I'm not!" Sawyer just made the cut off at 42" (which was the minimum for quite a few of the rides), so hopefully Sutton will be tall enough to ride the bigger rides next summer.

Stella had a super fun day with her big cousins, but she was getting too hot and sleepy, so Jessi and Erik took her home to rest after lunchtime.

We took a ride on the monorail. Sawyer loved being up so high and being able to see everything, especially all of the carnival rides below. Sutton was so tired that he almost fell asleep on the ride.

We ended the day with a few rides on the kiddy midway. If the fair offers the Read to Ride program again next year, I highly recommend it! We turned in a short book report form for three books that the boys have each read, and in exchange we got three ride tickets for each of them. We figured out that it saved us $18! A good percentage of the rides at the fair were from Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch, and Mitch and I commented to each other about how well kept and nicely painted they were in contrast to the other older carnival rides.

Sawyer & Sutton rode on a Jeep ride together.

Then Sawyer rode the flying dragons while Sutton rode a jet ski ride (again, he wasn't tall enough to ride the one that Saw went on)

Then they finished up with one last ride together on a different kind of Jeep.

We had an awesome day...but we're exhausted!!!