June, July, and August, the highlights

We went to the park. Here's a random shot of the bedlamites after one such trip.

We bathed our 4 youngest at least once in June, I think, and here is the photographic proof.

Cuteness Jane holding an Alma that is much too big for her to hold, but never too big to love!

I love this shot of my love & best friend holding our baby (this is at Menchie's frozen yogurt place).
And here's my love with our oldest daughter, she's getting to be quite the wonderful young lady...
Angel likes to read to the younger kids sometimes. He is very expressive and they always enjoy it. Oliver obviously is trying to seem disinterested here, but can't bring himself to leave the room...

We went swimming @ the Molen's this summer a few times. This was at the Deaf Branch 20th year reunion! Fun fun fun! (Seriously these captions are lame, but I need to remind myself what we were doing, OK?) I love that look he gives me when I'm taking a pic of him. :)

I don't have a pic at all, but Angel went on his first week long boy scout camping trip. He had a lot of fun even though he (and I!) was a little apprehensive about it. The day before he came back, we got a call from Grandma P in the hospital, she couldn't talk with a breathing apparatus down her throat, but had decided that not being able to breathe on her own meant it was time to say goodbye for now. We gave her all our love and assured her we would miss her dearly, and I called Angel to let him know he may not see her again and to call her if he'd like. So Great Grandma Pierson (or "Gma Great" as the fam calls her) shuffled off this mortal coil near the end of June. She is an awesome person. All of you should look her up in the next life especially if you didn't get to know/meet her here. We often eat dessert first just to think of her and honor her memory! This is a shot of Robert going 85 on our way out of Houston and to Cali for the funeral.

And here is a shot of the back of the car. Everyone cozy and occupied with something for the 36 hour drive (yes, we drove straight through, with a short couple hours long sleep at a rest stop somewhere in there). Alma did really well, though he was sick of the car seat after this trip for sure. We got him out every time we stopped, even just for bathroom breaks, and that helped. Memories are made of this.


Can you guess what Alma and I did when we got to Gma and Gpa's in Cali?


Here we all are in our Sunday best for the funeral,


and here's Horatio being reverent, AFTER sticking his finger in his nose for our nice family shot above. *sigh*


Every year (for those of you who are not Chick-fil-A fans) Chick-fil-A does a national day where if you dress like a cow you get free food. An entire meal free(!) just for making a slight fool of yourself at a fast food place (we did it all the time as teenagers, making a fool of ourselves not getting free food... ok maybe it was just me). Cow Appreciation Day happened to be the last day of our drive back home, so we printed "costumes" at the last hotel we stayed at, used duct tape and whatever else we had, and got free food for all of us. Score!


Tricia, Rhaine, Zack, and Rhyon came over a bit this summer, too! We are so blessed to live near my 2 sisters. We always have fun with them (I think that's Jordan in the back).

Swimming at the Molen's again. Also I have no pictures of this, but the kids (Jane, Horatio, Isa, & Oliver) took swim lessons with the Paruszewski's across the street from us (for CHEAP), and Ginger and Rori did an AMAZING job with all of them. I have instilled in the kids a (un?)healthy fear of drowning and they had been reluctant to truly learn to swim (the irony!), but Ginger handled them perfectly and even Jane was putting her head in the water and swimming independently in only a week of lessons! I hope she does it again this summer.


I also made my first cheesecake sometime in July. Oh, yum. Alton's recipe, of course.


We did some henna this summer, of course.



Elisabeth-Jane turned 4! Crazy, I know. We had the obligatory Chuck E. Cheese celebration and had to get a shot of her on the carousel. She is a great part of our family.

The Ver Hoefs who live in Dallas (and we were too tired to detour to see on the way home from Cali) came to see us! It was a short visit on a Sunday, but we got to hang out a bit and eat dinner together! I can't remember what they call this type of picture but the kids all love it.

Mid-August Robert and I spent our first ever couple of nights away from the kids (except Alma, of course). The hotel stay was a gift from Michael & Ally. It had a beautiful view as you can see a bit of here. And Angel & Oliver were amazing babysitters!

Alma officially started crawling this summer. He did an army crawl forever, which none of our other sifties ever did, so it was fun to see him do it. He would push just with his toes while pulling himself with his arms. He's always been very strong.

Isa's best friend, Isabelle, got baptized in August. It was a special day and Isa was glad to be there. (btw, the girls are fairly close in age, but Isabelle is tall and has tall parents, while our Isa is definitely petite.)


Angel made it to the rank of First Class scout this summer. He has an amazing scoutmaster who has gotten the boys very far in a short time. Angel has been working hard, and we hope he will continue with it & learn to be an even better leader and exemplary young man than he already is. (btw, the streak in my hair is a feather Laura put in while we were in California)

Overall we chilled out a lot this summer. Now let's see if I can get in some more blogging on a consistent basis...