Maisy's birthday party

Maisy is turning 11 soon, and Rocky is 11 next week.  These babies all grew up fast.  We got to go hang out with cousins for a few hours before everyone goes their separate ways.  I know my kids love the cousins so much.  

We usually pitch in with the garden every year, but this year more than most.  Sam helped plant the rows of corn, Jer and I hand mowed the lawn several weeks in a row to put the grass clippings in the garden, pruning and of course.... mowing the lawn and taking care of the rain gutters and swamp cooler.  It's looking so pretty.  

Rocky, Cyrus, Sam, Eli, Taylor

Walter

Seth, Evelyn, Cy, Walter, Taylor

Aubrey, Ada, Grace, Mariah

Walter

Ellie and Seth

Playing pigsticks the first time in years.

Ada, Joe, Aubrey, Mariah, Evelyn, Grace

always in 3?

So our dishwasher has been dead for about a month, shipping got delayed because of COVID til 3 more weeks out...... Our fridge is limping along and we ordered a new one because cleaning the coils did nothing..... Now Our AC is out. It's hotter in the house than outside... Good thing I just got the screens back in the windows today after cleaning the window tracts.  We've got the all wide open and the three fans on. Hopefully the guy comes sooner than later. We won't melt but I hope it's an easy fix. The AC is only about 10 or 11 years old.

Update:  We had to pay $650 to fix it, but at least we didn't have to pay to replace it!

Fireworks

No burned fingers, no fights erupting, little clean up and a giant show.  Win.

Will it smore?

Please ignore the mess in the back.  Broken dishwasher means lots of dishes drying on the counters.  We decided to pull out our smore maker and let Ada have free reign.  She cut up strawberries and bananas, pulled out Jer's good chocolate, pulled out the oreos and other cookies... Then we experimented with different combinations of oreos. 

July 4th

The morning of the 4th, we dressed up to cheer our neighbors as they put on a 4th of July parade.  It was super cute.  Then we enjoyed egg thingers for breakfast and did chores for the first half of the day.  We got all the tests from the COVID tests that we did earlier in the week.  They are all negative, which is awesome.  Then we went to the cemetery to shoot off rockets, played games together, had root beer floats, made hamburgers and shot off our fireworks.  Jer does a great job picking fireworks every year.  This year was no exception.  Extra bonus?  Since they aren't holding the Stadium of Fire this year, they put on three different firework shows all through Provo and Orem.  From our front porch, we had a direct view of the one that they did near Mountain View.  Our neighbors went a little extra in their fireworks too.  I think that the pandemic + civil unrest + everything that goes with them + local fires = very exuberant displays of patriotism and family parties.  It was quite the show.

4th of July

For our social distancing 4th of July, we went to a field next to the cemetery and shot off our new rockets.  It was hot so no one else was in the entire place and everyone had a blast, literally.  All the kids got to shoot off a rocket and Jer had fun with his new two stage rocket.  

This is Evelyn and Jer recovering from all our partying yesterday.