A Birthday and an Anniversary

Conrad turned 3 on Aug 19th. We enjoyed a fun birthday lunch together at Moe's. I don't really like the food there, but I love the chips and queso and so does Conrad. The queso isn't as good as some places in Austin, obviously, but I am just impressed I can get it anywhere here. We also went to Chuck e Cheese one day as a family. Conrad has been begging to go back. I wish it wasn't 45 minutes away, but that may be a blessing in disguise ;) It was also nice to actually have John there with us, so he can enjoy the special fun/torment that is Chuck e Cheese.

Conrad is hooked on the show "Octonauts" so we decided to recreate one of the characters for his cake. He requested Kwazii and I got the Swedish fish cupcake idea from Pinterest. I'm not gonna lie, I am pretty proud of how this one turned out.

Conrad is such a fun kid and he loves to be the center of attention. He is going to give Netta a run for her money. He likes to give us standing orations during dinner and if he feels like we are paying too much attention to the TV he will stand in front of it and say "Look at me!" We watched a lot of America's Got Talent this summer and he likes to do his own auditions. His talent seems to be doing a lot of downward dog poses. Not sure where he got that.

Conrad's birthday is the day before our anniversary and we had hoped to go to Chicago for the weekend to see John's brother-in-law play volleyball, but he had an international tournament that he had to go to that weekend. Luckily, kind of last minute we found a good deal on flights to his tournament in Long Beach and John got to fly free on my companion pass, so it was too good to pass up. Our awesome friends the Reeves watched the kids for us and we loved getting to see some of John's family, including his nephew Ethan who is serving a mission there, and watching amazing volleyball players from around the world. 

Of course one of the best parts about leaving town is getting to eat amazing food and you know California did not disappoint. I got hooked on acai bowls, which I are kind of healthy, but we also had some not so healthy, but oh so delicious, chicken and waffles from the original Roscoe's. 

Between some of the matches they called people out from the audience to compete in a competition. John and I were chosen and I had to sit in a chair, while he served volleyballs to me and I tried to catch them. They had us going against some high school girls and while it might have been the nice thing to let them win, I wasn't going to mess up on purpose and so we beat them soundly and got some awesome swag ;) While we were walking back up to our seats, the girls parents walked by and jokingly said "Thanks for breaking our girls' hearts." Oops, but I promise they were joking.

Unfortunately, Casey and Jake did not have their best performance this tournament, but we loved seeing them play and we went back even after they were out to watch some of the other Olympic contenders. We are really hoping that Jake and Casey make it to the Olympics. They have a really good chance and in fact, we already have had to commit and buy tickets for some of the volleyball events in Rio. Supposedly, they will be really easy to sell if they don't make it, but we are hoping it doesn't come to that.

We also got to shop till we dropped, see "The Man from UNCLE," which was awesome, and hit up this humongous flee market. We scored some awesome deals, which unfortunately were negated when our car got towed. That was such a hot mess and just ridiculous, but we just let it go and didn't let it ruin our trip. That is not something that always comes easy to me, but I am getting better! Oh and I even survived the last minute somewhat scary motel we had to stay in the first night we got there. I refused to touch the floor with my bare feet, but we made it through the night without anything stolen ;)

End of Summer Fun

While I was at the last day of scout camp with EZ, John and the other kids had fun exploring downtown. We love the sculptures this summer and we have a ton of pictures of the kids in front of various whales and rubber duckies.

Chalk the Block is always a really exciting part of summer and I was sad to miss the chance to walk around with all the kids. The artwork is always amazing.

I enjoyed camp with EZ and I really loved the skit that the kids came up with for the final campfire. EZ was painfully shy when he was little, but now he is confident in front of people and really funny!

Our friends Jon and Elise came to visit with their kids for the day and of course we had to take them to the carousel. They have an old bumper car in there and we got this cute pic of King and Netta. I love any pic I can get of the two of them getting along.

We have done the carousel a lot and I keep waiting for it to get old, but the kids still seem to love it and the dress up clothes are always a hit.

I have been really impressed with the programs the library has for the kids and now EZ is old enough to start taking part in the tween activities and they are even more awesome. They got to go to the beach and have a professional sand sculptor help them make this enormous lizard thing. The other kids and I tagged along to watch and everyone loved it. 

We were excited to be able to attend one of the open houses for the Indianapolis Temple before it was dedicated. I have never been to a temple open house before and it was such a wonderful faith building experience. The best part was how much EZ enjoyed it and how good he said it made him feel. 

We went down with our friends the Reeves and we were also able to meet up with my friend Sarah, whose family lives in Iowa now, but were driving through on their way home from vacation. Sarah is one of my good friends from MSU and we had our first kids at the same time, so it was really fun to catch up and to see Claire and EZ together.

Since we were in Indianapolis, we decided it would be the best time to go visit Conner Prairie, the old time village place that EZ missed visiting with his class while we were in Austin. It was a bit muggy out, but we still had a lot of fun. Before we could stop them King and Conrad had climbed into this bed. I don't even want to think about what could have been in there. 

EZ got the privilege of being the pretend patient who had to have a blood letting. The look on his face is priceless. Thank goodness for modern medicine!

The Sunday after we got back, John said he needed to go hit some golf balls to practice for a charity golf outing the next day. I wasn't too keen on that and then I got a little concerned when he was gone for a really long time. Finally, he called to let me know that he was trapped in the parking lot by a fire truck that came to put out a golf cart that spontaneously went up in flames. That is what you get for breaking the Sabbath ;)

We discovered another fun thing to do in the summer here. There are some moms who put on Art in the Park, where you go to the park and they have set up stations with all different types of art projects. They just do it, because they want to and all they do is that you make a small donation to help cover supplies. The kids loved it and I was just bummed we didn't hear about it till the end of the summer. There happened to also be a charter high school from Benton Harbor having a end of year party on the other side of the pavilion. Benton Harbor is not known for having the best public schools and there is definitely a clear race/economic division between Benton Harbor and St. Joe. They had extra food that they offered all of us, which was wonderful, but then one of the teachers said she was just grateful that we were willing to share the pavilion with them, because there are people that wouldn't and would have negative things to say about their students. That was a really sad and really eye opening conversation. 

Finally, the boys were able to go on a father son camp out with John. When John went on the daddy daughter camp out with Netta there was a huge rain storm and that is exactly what happened this weekend as well! Luckily, they were still able to have some fun, despite getting basically no sleep thanks to the storm. Of course I am a fan of anything that has John spending more time with the kids and me getting a little bit of a break ;) Netta and I had some fun with our girl friends and those little girls were party animals. I think they would have stayed up all night if we had let them.