Max the Builder

Last night Max was in his room playing with his Lego Duplos. After a while he came to me and told me that he had built a rhinoceros so I told him to take Maddie in to see it. Much to my surprise she came out holding a rhinoceros made of Lego Duplos! I was shocked that Max could make something like that so I asked him how he did it. He said he looked at the box. So I went his his room and on the box that holds the Legos there are pictures. He had followed the picture exactly, all by himself! He had also made a boy that was on the picture and then he said he was going to try to make a boat that was on a picture on the another side of the box. Bret came home when Max was building the boat and snapped a couple pictures of the things Max made and the pictures on the box.



Max also likes to build other things. He loves to set up dominoes and then knock them down. Sometimes his designs get pretty elaborate. Here is a picture I took of one he did yesterday afternoon.


He also loves to build what he calls "sets" with his wooden train tracks. He gets pretty creative and has started using 2X4's to make hills for his tracks. Here is his latest "set".

Pioneer Day

Tooele has a Children's Parade for Pioneer Day. All of the ward Primaries make a float for the parade. I was surprised at how big it turned out to be. Max and I rode together in the float for our ward. Bret and Maddie watched with Ben and Christina and baby Andy. Here are a few pictures.




Audra's little scraps is giving away a cute Pioneer digital scrapbooking kit for scrapping your Pioneer Day pictures. She does some really cute free LDS themed kits.

Decorating Blogs

As many of you know I have been doing digital scrapbooking for about a year now. I enjoy is so much more than paper scrapping. Anyway, lately I have been using some of my digiscrapping skills to decorate blogs. Here links to a few I have done.

Heather

Joni

Emily

One of these days I am going to figure out how to make this blog a little more colorful! It is more complicated because it isn't a blogspot blog. Anyway, if any of you want me to decorate your blog let me know, I love doing it.

Happy Birthday Maddie

Maddie turned two on Friday! We had a BBQ to celebrate. I made cupcakes in ice cream cones earlier that morning and Maddie was wanting to eat one all day. At her party when she got to eat one she bit into it then she broke it in half, she was looking for the ice cream and was disappointed to find only cake inside the cone . So we got her a real ice cream cone. Here are a few pictures from the BBQ.



On Saturday we went to the zoo. Maddie loves animals and she was so excited to see all the different animals. Her favorite animal at the zoo was the rhinoceros! We visited them three times because she kept talking about them. The last time we saw them there was a man that came up with his daughter and he said to his daughter, "Look at the hippos." Maddie turned to him and said "Rhinoceros!" It was pretty funny. Another highlight for her was the carousel! She loved it. She is still telling us she wants to ride the penguin.

4th of July Weekend

We had a really long 4th of July weekend. We left Tuesday night and stopped in Manti for the night. Wed morning we got up and drove down to Calf Creek Falls Campground in the Escalante National Monument area. We hiked that day to Calf Creek Falls, it was a long (about 3 miles each way) hike and it got very hot so we had to make a lot of stops a long the way. But the kids had fun playing on the rocks. When we got to the falls, they were beautiful! The kids were itching and ready to go swimming! The water was really cold but that didn't seem to bother them. I didn't get a picture of it but at one point Bret went running and diving into falls yelling, "Wahooo!!!" When he got out he looked around and said, "Oh, I guess we aren't the only ones here." It was pretty funny. Here are some pictures of the hike. The first one is looking down into the canyon that we hiked through.








On Thursday we took a "side road" from our camp into Capitol Reef National Park. There was some beautiful scenery on the drive but it got pretty bumpy at times. At one point there were some cows on the road and they were running from our truck but they would not move out of the road so we could pass them. Maddie thought it was pretty entertaining.


We met up with my Mom, my sister Heather and her girls at Capitol Reef. We went for a hike through The Grand Wash. The kids had fun climbing on the walls and exploring the holes in the sand stone.




We then went and had lunch in the park. There were deer everywhere and they weren't afraid of the people at all. Maddie loves animals and we couldn't get her to sit and eat, she wanted to go follow the deer around. There was also a really cool old tree with branches that hung down and twisted around everywhere.



We then went to another water fall, to cool off from the heat. Both mine and Heather's kids love swimming so the kids had a fun time. There were people diving off the rocks near the waterfall. The first picture you can see Bret as he is starting to jump off. On the left side you can see my neice Gracie. After Bret jumped Gracie jumped. I couldn't believe she did it! Bret said she was less afraid then he was. After they jumped Max found a smaller rock to jump from .




We then headed back to Manti to spend the rest of the weekend. We had a great time spending time with family. The kids had fun lighting sparklers and watching the fireworks.