Summer Fun!

Since I haven't posted in so long I thought I would post some random pictures from our summer.

We spent our summer eating some delicious summer treats...Finding weird random places to sleep...

Swimming in our HUGE swimming pool!

We spent the summer painting each other....

At swim lessons (I don't have a picture of Landen, but he was there)

Dodging some huge hail stones. That is a half dollar coin next to them. My parents and grandparents had surprised us that weekend for a visit and they left with some souvenir hail dents from the storm. (These weren't from our most recent hail storm these were from the one in May.)

Fishing...LOTS of Fishing

Squirt ball games! Ramell, Jackson, Rondell, and Landen with their awesome bobble head trophies after their last game.

Of course we put on huge headsets so we could watch and not have to hear fireworks. And the summer would not have been complete without burning some poor innocent ants with sparklers:)

So Maybe we did....

So maybe we did fall off the face of the Earth! Its been a long time since I have posted anything, but hey at least I did start again:) So here is my lame excuse. Who really likes to read post with no pictures??? I figure the only reason people even look at this is to see pictures. Well we have lost our cable that plugs the camera into the computer to upload pictures. Thus...the reason no posts for so long. Well tonight as I was doing other things I realized that I could put my memory stick into my printer and import the pictures onto my computer!! Yes I know I am brilliant (funny side note thank goodness for spell check I spelt brilliant wrong). Hopefully this now means I will blog more! I guess time will only tell!

Look who Turned 1!!!

Paisley looking at her challenge. To say the least she didn't quite know what to think of a huge slab of cake put right onto her tray:)

Our traditional train cake. I had LOTS of help from Porter making this cake just for Paisley.

After Landen got home from school we headed straight to the Omaha Children's Museum. Hattie and Paisley had a lot of fun shopping and Dad had a lot of fun making their items go across the conveyer belt.

All the kiddos LOVE playing in the water!

Paisley loving having the whole train table to herself:)

During the afternoon we went to playgroup and took some cupcakes to help celebrate Paisley big day! She LOVED her cupcake!

Paisley got a new trike and animals for her birthday. She loves to go on walk on her bike like the Big Kids do:)

No...

We haven't fallen of the face of the earth

Moved to an isolated island

or

Gone into the witness protection program

Since we posted last in November life has got SUPER CRAZY! Between, 4 kids, one of which still doesn't sleep through the night, work, school, and Church callings blogging has been put on the back burner.

But we are back. We are figuring life out...Well sort of. I should say we are figuring out how to balance life out. I hope you enjoy all the pictures and who knows maybe I will be able to stay on top of it:)

Enjoy

Baby Shower

In February Jana and I threw a Baby Shower for our friend Julianne. It was so much fun getting ready for this! Jana had a great idea to do Fruit Bouquets. Lucky for me she has great ideas and lets me tag along. We made them the night before and I think they turned out really cute. They are a lot cheaper than buying them. All you need is a knife, flower shape cookie cutter, and melon baller. Lots of tooth picks and skewers. We also made a vegetable one. We made it the night before which is a mistake. Make sure if you are to make one you make it the morning of close to when the party starts. It was also easy to assemble.

The Fruit and Veggie Bouquet (This is the morning of. Notice what happens to the veggies if you do it the night before. They all dry up and they aren't so cute. Good thing I had a bag of carrots left. So the veggie bouquet was just for display:) The Fruit was still good and was very tasty!

So I thought I was tricky, but these were the prizes. A Movie Basket. Its hard to buy good clean flicks these days, but I was at Target and noticed this I Love Lucy movie with 20 Episodes for a great deal. I just put some chocolates and popcorn in with it. The next is a good book, Wednesday Letters and a box of candy. When I am in Utah I hit up Seagull Book and get good books for a great price for just this kind of thing. The last is the Garden Basket. It included a big packet of flower seeds, gardening gloves, and a cute frog garden decoration. I found the frog and flower packet at Target in the dollar bins. The gloves and watering can I also found at Target in the Gardening section. So I was thrilled with how they turned out and thought I would share.

The Diaper Cake. Every baby shower needs one. The top is real flowers inside a baby bottle filled with water and the rest are fake. I didn't want to ruin the diapers:)

So this is the veggie bouquet right after I finished. It looks a lot better. If I were to do it again. I would make the cucumbers into small spears instead of stacking them as rings. I was trying to come up with a way to be able to still eat them without them being huge. So just an idea if you decide to make them.

Okay so I have found my new hobby! CUPCAKES!! So I know all of you in Utah have cupcake stores on every corner, but here in Nebraska we are a little behind in things. I can only think of 1 store that sells fancy cupcakes. (There may be more I don't know about) So I decided to get as creative and went crazy with cupcakes. These are all mini cupcakes. The toppings are chocolate, mint, orange, vanilla, and raspberry. They were all so good. I had so much fun making them! I am in the process of making a ton of them for a Relief Society Party. I will post pictures when I am done!

Snow Much FUN!

We've had a blast in the snow this year. We've gone sledding down our road, sledding behind 3 Wheelers at the Hanks house, and building Snow Men in the back yard. We've had fun, but we are ready for SPRING:)

Christmas 2010

Christmas Eve

YEAH!!! Presents! Santa brought:

Paisley: Wobbley Penguin. Stacking Stars, and a Tea Set

Hattie: A Kitchen, play food, and Uno Moo

Porter: Crayon Maker, Play-do Factory, and Kerplunk

Landen: Zhu-Zhu Pizza Shop, Mouse Trap, and a BB Gun (He was pretty nervous when he opened it up. He didn't think he was old enough to have a gun:)

Whats going on?

Landen showing us his shot. He hit the target every single time. He even got a couple of bulls-eyes! He LOVED it!

Christmas was great. We spent the whole day as a family eating, lounging, and playing.