July 2014 in Pictures

Summer nights around a fire are just about my favorite:

Yay! We got another Fourth of July on the lake! We enjoyed ou morning sleeping in and did a few little crafts before heading over to Grandpa's house.

I just love this face:

We made some edible flags:

And some tee shirts:

Then we got down to business:

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Lucy, our pro skiier:

Oh the faces this girl makes:

Setting off a few fireworks:

Luke was asleep during our little photo shoot. He eventually came around. I always seem to love the silly candids the best. Even Logan does it!

Trying out the water. He loved it:

2 Lukes:

Eden is Logan's favorite person.  Even over Peter and I.

If you look close you can see Lily's mustache. Yes she drew it on with marker, and yes, she did it on purpose. Sometimes, you just need a little 'stache.

Ready for fireworks: This is the dingy full. There were over 20 people in the boat this year.  It was snug!

Then we had a very special baptism for a very silly boy. He was the only baptism for the stake that month so we had a nice, small group.  Lori gave a great talk about Super Heros and how getting the Holy Ghost is kind of like having a super power.  Very fitting for this guy:

The kids sang "I Like to Look for Rainbows" as a special number. It was so so so so cute! Tanner sang the last line of the last verse as a solo and it just made it that much sweeter.  It was awesome.  We sang it as a family a couple weeks later in Sacrament Meeting by the bishops request.

Not in the mood for a family picture:

That's a bit better:

Eden is quite a puzzle lover.  She always has been but has recently been collecting these certain 100 piece animal ones from the dollar store.  She will do several of them in one sitting.

One day we had cousins over so we went to see the ducks:

Cousin babies Logan and Emmet. This was their first official "hang out".

 
We managed to get to the drive in again to see Maleficent. This is still one of my favorite summer past times. We had a big group with family from both sides and friends.

I brought goodies to make edible necklaces for the kids to snack on during the movie.  It was a big hit.  We even had a lot of random kids we didn't know come and make some.

This was a perk of tagging along with Dad to work one day. He thought it was very Minecraftesque:



We had many swim meets this summer.  I was especially proud of Tanner for joining the swim team so bravely and improving very quickly. He was one of the smallest kids.

Eden is such an athlete.  She works hard at any sport she does.  Nice arms!

Sherry and Mark came into town, so we did a lot of fun Dickinson activities in one week. We did this back yard movie/s'mores one night. We watched a Scooby Doo cartoon movie about wrestling that was...entertaining.

Us girls went on a run one night.  We had to take a picture when we realized we were all in blue!

Dallin thinks dominos only have one real purpose:

Logan going for some real food.  Green beans were not his bag. He was doing that cute baby gag thing:

Michelle hosted a cousin water party complete with snow cones:

Baby cousins. Logan will have plenty of playmates!

The kids went to the school park with Grandma:

We went on a ward campout with our old ward:

Big bonfire:

I found some LED balloons so we surprised the kids with them in the tent.  It was so fun, except we had to be quiet because it was getting late. These things are so cool though:

Dallin got a little pup tent for his birthday, so he and Tanner tried it out.  They slept great all night. Kind of sad for me to have kids old enough to not sleep with us. But also, very nice!

We packed up our stuff and met up with the family, including Sherrie and Heidi's families! We played at the beach for a long time and then went to the cheese factory for lunch.

Then we hiked to a light house.  The hike was really fun and the light house was pretty, but we were too late to go inside.

Hmmmm:

We had a big family dinner on Sunday so we decided to get a picture since there were siblings in town:

Dallin will build with anything he can get his hands on I tell you!


Sherry, Lucy, and I went for an adventure one day to Silver Falls with all our kids. We hiked for hours and explored as we went:

We maxed out our van with 10 kids in the benches. This was one happy bunch:

We spent quite a while counting up those rings:

Dallin learned at cub camp that these giant clovers are edible.  Sure enough, they taste like a very tart strawberry!  We had a lot of fun collecting and eating them.

I think the kids were more interested in exploring the caves under the waterfall than the actuall waterfall.  The trail down was super steep with a double stroller to boot, but was worth it.  We ate Hershey bars and played around for a long long time.

Dirty bum and ripped pants in the end:

After we got home, exhausted we decided to rush off to the county fair since it was Sherrie's last night there:

We didn't do rides, we mostly walked around and looked at tons of animals:

We had a very busy saturday in August when we had a 5k race and 3 picnics all in one day.  It was kind of fun just going from one party to the next all day. We started off with the Hillsboro Stake run.  They had a stroller division and I got first place! I was very surprised, but hey I'll take it!

Lily joined this group because she was matching their tutus.

First picnic/carnival with the Larry's stake. There were tons of games and booths for the kids and some yummy food, including bbq and about a hundred pies.

Lily, wet from the slip'n slice waited quite a while to do this fishing game.  We watched carefully as people were rewarded with all kinds of candy.

I loved this moment when all she got was a rubber band bracelet.  She didn't know what it was, just that it was not candy.  She said "thank you" in the saddest little disappointed voice ever.  She was a good sport though so we decided that she should get back in line and go another round.

At a park:

Our second picnic was the Hedman family reunion.  It was fun and we got lots more food.  I am pretty sure Lily ate one of everything from the dessert table.

Then we went to our ward pioneer party.  Once again, lots of food and fun activities for the kids.  There favorite was this leather stamping and throwing pennies into glass vases, etc, to which they would get to keep if they got in.

Boy that was one long, fun day.  We just couldn't decide which one to do so for crazy people like us, all three worked out just fine.

Tanner, being 8 now got to go to his first cub camp.  He loved every second of it!

He somehow picked up on archery quickly and got 5 bulleseys! I guess he takes after his older brother.

The other things that kept us busy in July were more swim lessons, swim team and taekwondo that we got a Groupon for. Dallin, Eden and Tanner got to do try it out 3 times a week for 8 weeks.   They enjoyed it, but no one really took enough interest to pursue it.