5 months

Fun with family

Last weekend my brother Nate and his girlfriend Tiffany came to visit us. Yay! We loved having them here.
We realized that there isn't a whole lot of stuff to do in Phoenix in the summer. ('Cause its HHHHHHOT!) But we still kept busy. We went to Fountain Hills for a pizza picnic.

Love this picture.

We went on a date night with Matt and Ali and got pizza and frozen yogurt. Yum.
We tried out Wet 'n' Wild which was a total bust for us. I'm sure most days it would have worked out, but there really wasn't anything for my girls to do since they were too short to even play on the kid's slides and then on top of that Julia got sick so we couldn't hang out in the lazy river or something like that. I think Nate and Tiff got to go on 3 slides. Ben went on 2 and I went on 1. We asked for our money back. But, good memories, right?
We visited the Mesa Temple. I love the grounds there.

We swam a lot in the community pools

Ben and Nate got to enjoy some quality guy time with their all-time favorite activity: StarCraft. The girls adored having Tiffany here. She was a great sport and played all their games. Julia liked to play house and Adria's favorite was Tag. We also had pizza a few more times. We love pizza. Nate fixed up all the problems with our yard because he is awesome like that. Thanks Nate! They headed back Tuesday night. The best part, though, was what happened yesterday.

Yay!!!!! Congratulations guys!!!! We are soooooooooooooo excited to add Tiffany to our family!

Learning

We have had some fun times lately. We've also had a few times when I wanted to slam my head against the wall.

Julia this week learned how to put together furniture. She really enjoyed herself. We got a TV stand and she hammered in all the wooden pegs and screwed in a lot of the screws. I was very impressed.

I decided some time ago not to blog about all the messes and trouble the girls get into because I generally believe that they are just exploring their world and I don't want them to feel like I am frustrated with their curiosity. But, somethings just need to be blogged about. When it was all said and done, today's disaster was really my fault. Adria told me this morning that she had made me a mud pie and wanted to cook it. She pulled my hand to come and see, but I was feeding Kara and by the time I was done, Adria had moved on to other things and I quickly forgot about the mud pie. Fast forward to 5:30pm. The missionaries were coming over and so I wanted to have some cookies. I turned on the oven and then swept the floor while it preheated. Ben was doing dishes and told me there was a weird smell. I attributed it to the day-old-sippy of milk he was washing out. (Okay, that's a lie, it was like a week old). At least, I did for a few more minutes until I opened the oven to put in the cookies.

Luckily, Adria's mud pie recipe called for lots of water which helped the main part of the boat not to melt all over my oven. Also, the boat was a nice heavy plastic so it wasn't too bad. Ben was able to save the oven from any damage. I learned my lesson. Always go see the mud pie, and always, always check the oven before I turn it on.

Little Dancer

Julia had her first big recital on Saturday. She did so wonderful! We were amazed at how well she knew her routines. She did a jazz routine to a fun version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and then an adorable ballet routine to "Animal Crackers In My Soup." Julia seemed to be in heaven the whole night. She really loves dancing and watching the other routines was so fun for her! I didn't get a picture of her in her Spider costume yet because it was her first dance and we were running way late since we didn't realize the freeway was closed. I will take one soon though! The pictures I did get were a little blurry since it was night and the lighting at the high school was terrible. Also, I didn't think about the fact that Julia would work up a sweat and so I didn't get her waterproof mascara. Oops. 

Ben and Adria brought Julia some flowers, which totally made her night.

Julia's ballet and tap teacher, Miss Zoe. We absolutely LOVE Miss Zoe!!

The moms tried to get all the girls lined up for a picture, but this is what we got. These girls were all such sweethearts. Julia told me she wants all of them to be in her class in the fall.

After Julia's routines were done there was still about an hour left and Julia wanted so badly to stay and watch. Adria and Kara were over it though so I took them out to run around outside. Isn't Adria such a cutie!?