The End of An Era - Times Two

Thursday was a BIG day. Josh finished his last two classes for his Bachelors degree (!) and Mom retired! Amazing that both events happened the same day. We started celebrating Josh's accomplishment in May when he walked at Spring Commencement and we are going to keep on celebrating!

It has been a long journey and we are so grateful to finally reach this goal. Now it's on to grad school!

And we all (except Josh because he was literally in his last final exam) enjoyed being together to celebrate Mom at her retirement party.

June...Bugs?

I thought I would continue the monthly titles but my creativity only goes so far! ;) It was time for another birthday date and it turned out to be another really awesome time! Friday night we had the typical requested gourmet dinner of Mac n Cheese, movie watching, and playing in the tub. And of course we had orange rolls for breakfast :). On Saturday it was Flag Day so we had to put up flags first thing in the morning. The boys did a good job of team work!

Then we went to his T-ball game and got to meet his little admirer :).

 

Then we went to Summerfest and he got his face painted and a balloon snake. And of course we had to ride some carnival rides and eat lots of delicious carnival food.

 

 

We figure this is the sign of a successful birthday date! We partied hard!

 

Later on in June was the air show at Hill AFB. The air show is almost like going to Disneyland for me! I LOVE JETS! We went up with the parents and spent the whole day on base watching the aerial displays and touring the aircraft on the ground and of course topping it off with the Thunderbirds. The rest of the family met up with us and we all got to watch the Thunderbirds together. I didn't take many pictures because I was too busy taking it all in :) but here are a couple. The view is always better on top of Uncle Joshie!

 



May Flowers

May was a pretty fun month - the highlights were a wedding and a trip to Texas! A very good friend got married and it was wonderful to be a part of it.

They moved to Texas a week later so I no longer have her here but if I can't have her here the next best place is Texas! In fact, we flew out to Texas that very night! It was so nice to be with family and with old friends. We tried our best to spread ourselves around but we just need way more time there to visit everyone. Everyone got together for dinner one evening and we wore ourselves out playing. I played giddy-up giddy-up with the smallest and smallish of the kids for so long I started losing my voice, literally, and as is typical Josh had kids climbing all over him. We made a huge mess of the play room (which we cleaned up before everyone went to bed like a good aunt and uncle) but we got some reading time in first.

The last time we saw Sophia she was still in the hospital so we finally were able to play with her and spend a lot more time with her. She had grown a ton and was the most smiley and happy kid! Except of course she's zonked out on Josh in this picture...

Not long after we were there she went back into the hospital so that they could wean her off the ventilator. It was supposed to happen in stages but she did so well that they kept going and she is now completely off the ventilator for the first time in her life. Miracles still happen!

We spent a couple days out visiting Grandma and we enjoyed discovering evidence of the impact that she and Josh's Grandpa have had on their community.

We visited the park that she landscaped and cares for.

 

We did lots more visiting and put some pretty good miles on the rental car (one of Josh's most favorite things to do), visited a museum and all that stuff. Our dream of taking a side trip to the coast has still never happened but one of these days we are going to make it work! And we may or may not have stayed up way too late. A few times. You can't really tell from the picture but I found it very interesting that both of the little boys in our families tend to end up sleeping with only their head on the bed and the rest somewhere else (in the closet, under our bed...). Maybe it is just when we are around. I wonder what that means...









April Showers

A couple fun events in April. We celebrated our anniversary by spending the weekend at a little bed and breakfast. We got snowed on just like we did for our wedding :)

We had one of our niece's birthday "date" which is a fun tradition that we and the kids look forward to! As their mother once said, "there is nothing better in life than sleeping on your floor and eating orange rolls." We spent the weekend playing, watching movies, playing in the tub (which apparently they only do at our house!), staying up too late, eating orange rolls for breakfast, playing some more, going swimming, playing in the tub again (rubber duckies are the best thing ever!), and playing some more!

Love Is In The Air

My sister got engaged this weekend so we will be having a wedding this summer! Congratulations to my sister and her fiancé!





Welcome Home Josh

Last Saturday we celebrated Josh's return from being gone for 10 days for work so we ignored our chores :) and took a short trip up north to the Union Station museum in Ogden. We had wanted to go there for a while and we finally did it. There are several little museums within the station and trains outside.

 

 

 

 

They have a car museum with some beautiful automobiles inside:

The Cadillac above is worth about $2 million dollars :). We had lunch and took a drive to see the Ogden Temple and got some ice-cream. It was great to be together again!

New Year's 2014

Josh is gone all this week for work and I figured I needed to do something productive while I'm sitting here feeling sorry for myself! So I'll post about our New Year's trip to South Carolina to visit the Grandma and all our southern relatives! We LOVE visiting SC, it's always just some great days and it reminds Josh of Texas so that makes it even better.  We hung out a bunch with Grandma and she and Josh got to continue their discussion about which actors she thinks are good looking ;)

We took a little side trip down to Charleston and it was awesome of course! I have been there several times over the decades but Josh had never been so it was fun to be there for the first time together. We went to Patriot's Point and we were able to add some more museum ships to our list (I have still been on more museum ships than Josh has ha ha!). So here comes USS Yorktown (an Essex-class carrier), USS Laffey (a Sumner-class destroyer), and USS Clamagore (a Balao-class submarine)!

 

 

We spent our morning walking around most of the historic district down near the battery. It is so beautiful and I loved that I got to share it with Josh. And I loved that there just happened to be a bright shiny fire truck parked on one of the streets so that I could get a picture of MY firefighter by it!

Can't wait until our next trip down south! And I can't wait until Josh gets back home! :)