Cousins and Family Pics

Okay, installment two of the Utah trip is actually going to make an appearance earlier than I thought. I guess I can thank Mother Nature. We have had some crazy weather out here this month, starting with thunderstorms--I have never witnessed such incredible thunder and lightning. One night Paul and I woke up in the middle of the night--the house was shaking from the roaring thunder and the lightning was illuminating our room. It was quite awesome--and a little scary. Anyway, almost every week there has been at least one huge thunderstorm, and it seems like every weekend is soggy. This August holds the record for the wettest in history for the Philadelphia area. Then, last Tuesday we had an earthquake!!--very unusual for this part of the country. And, last night we experienced Hurricane Irene (also unusual for this far north). Anyway, today is a rainy day and there are still heavy gusts of wind with the danger of trees falling over, so we are hanging out inside. A huge benefit of having the playroom in the basement is that my computer is right there in the room, so I can get a little bit done between setting up games, finding toys, and mediating fights (and it definitely feels like I do an awful lot of the latter).

I still have an insane amount of baby preparation to do on top of all of the blogging I need to catch up on. I still haven't looked at any of the pictures we took in VT, let alone Sammy's birthday (which, weather aside, was very low-key). I think I am insanely busy now--whatever will I do when baby #3 makes his debut?? At least I think I will feel better. For my first two pregnancies I held to the mantra that a newborn was much easier to take care of in the womb rather than out. But, this time my thinking has changed. I don't need to go into how miserable this pregnancy is making me again, let's just say I can't wait for this little guy to come out. I think life will be much easier when he is on the outside...

Okay--back to the UT trip. Max and Sam had so much fun playing with all of their cousins. We particularly got to spend a lot of time with Brooks, and he and Max were best buddies.

Brooks lost his first, and then his second tooth while we were there. I was a little shocked--I still remember when Brooks turned 1 and had just started living with Judd in SLC. Paul and I would pick him up from daycare once a week and hang out with him for a few hours. We still get teased for sending him home with his diaper on backwards!

Max and Brooks guzzling a Corona mid afternoon! Actually, my mom makes the MOST AMAZING homemade rootbeer, and the best bottles to use are beer bottles. We were drinking a lot of the yummy rootbeer and enjoyed homemade rootbeer floats the whole month we were there--heaven!! (No wonder I gained 10 pounds that month!)

Little Sam. Actually big-boy Sam. His vocabulary advanced immensely while in UT--he began speaking in sentences and articulating words very clearly. Also, we began preliminary potty training which I continued to work on when we got back to PA. We were very proud of our not-even-two year old who can peepee in the potty and wear big boy underwear. He still wears a diaper at night, however, and we still need to work on #2 a bit (he will tell us when he has to go, but prefers to do it in a diaper--still a step in the right direction).

The kids had tons of fun playing outside--in the little pool, on the slip-and-slide, or just spraying each other with the hose and squirt guns.

Sam has a cousin his age to play with--we got to spend a couple of weekends with Oakley while we were there.

Don't be fooled--this is not a Halloween picture. This is Max and Brooks on the 4th of July!

Aunt Marnie, Jeslyn, Jauncee and baby Clay came to UT to spend a week while we were there. It was so nice to be able to visit with my sister and her cute kids. I hadn't seen them in so long, her baby was practically a newborn when we were in UT last September and got to see them for about 2 hours the day we landed in SLC. So, I was really happy when she decided to come to Gramma Jill's for a whole week!

Sam initially felt a little threatened by having another--smaller--baby in the house. At first he was taking toys away from Clay and yelling whenever his younger cousin would scoot too close to him. By the end, though, he was happy to share anything--including fruit loops!

Then, there were the cousins in Kanosh...

Not only did we get to see cousin Brady, but my Aunt Margaret was visiting from Alabama with her kids, and Max and Sam even got to play with several of my cousins' kids--fun, fun fun!!

Brady was so good and fun with both boys...

Now that we are living in Pennsylvania, Marnie lives in Idaho, and Judd's youngest, Oakley, lives in St. George with her mom, it is rare that all of us are together at the same time. It just so happened that on Marnie's last day in UT, Judd got Oakley for the weekend. So, we were finally all together (except for Paul and Dirk, that is). But, we figured this was as good as it was going to get for a while, and we decided to take some family pictures. We briefly thought about hiring a photographer, but it was all planned so last-minute that we figured we could just use the self-timer function on my camera and a tripod to do it ourselves. The backdrop was the big haystacks in Hawbush, and the pictures actually turned out quite nicely!

All of the grandkids...

I am still amazed that we managed to capture a photo of everyone looking at the camera for the family picture--but we did!!

Unfortunately the grandparent/grandkid one didn't turn out quite so well... the poor kids had had enough!

Okay, enough for one blog-session. I think I need to work on the baby-preparation to-d0-list now. I figure I can finish the UT trip in one more entry--stay tuned!!