Rebekah is 6!

It's a little hard to believe that our beautiful, helpful, sweet Rebekah is 6 years old now!

She was very specific about wanting a pink butterfly cake with cupcakes around the outside of the cake.  So this is what I came up with.  (Kind of funny looking, but Rebekah liked it.)

Trying to play a clapping game with a bunch of six year olds.  It didn't work very well.  The only game that really worked was freeze tag.

 This is the first party we've let Rebekah invite friends to, she was very excited to pick her 5 favorite friends. 

Blowing out the candles

excited getting ready to open gifts

We opened gifts from Nana and Papa and Mom and Dad on her actual birthday.  (The party was the Saturday before.)

LOVED the doll!

Loved the bike!

So happy to play with the doll and her new bike.  

We are so grateful to have Rebekah in our family.  She has been a blessing in our lives.  She has matured a lot over the past year and has become pretty responsible.  Her favorite thing to do in all the world is PLAY.  She likes to play with her siblings and LOVES having a foster sister one year older than her.  She wishes she could just play and play all the time.  She is in first grade this year and is enjoying it, but complains that it is too long and I agree.  (I hate having such young children gone all day.  I wish there was an option to do half day school and half day home school.)  Rebekah is reading well, and learning to add and subtract.  Her favorite song is "Army of Heleman."  Her favorite colors are pink, purple, and red.  We sure love our Bekah Bubbles. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY REBEKAH!

Family update

We recently added two foster daughters to our family for a short time.  They joined our family two days after we got home from our big two week trip.  They are sweet girls and we are glad to have them.  They should be going home to their mom in the next few months. So, this is probably a temporary addition. They are seven and eleven years old.  Wish we could post pictures of them!

Yellowstone Family reunion

 We had a good time at Yellowstone with Jessica's family for our family reunion.  We were a little sad when we got home a realized we didn't get any pictures of us with any of the natural hot springs or geysers.  But, we did get pictures of our family camping. 

 These first few is us waiting to see Old Faithful blow.

I love Brittany's face in this picture!

Now here are the camping pictures.  We sure had a good time visiting with family and camping together.  I'm so glad everyone was able to make it!

Rebekah taking pictures of everyone

Handsome Brigham

Aunt Tasha

Timtohy

Hyrum

Mikayla

Rebekah

Aunt Katherine and Aunt Marji

Aunt Brittany and Grandma

Me with my mom! 

Three little girl cousin playing together

Three boy cousins playing together

This is what Hyrum does everytime I ask him to look at me.

Aunt Katherine and Uncle Jason

Uncle Andrew, Faith, Aunt Katherine

Cousins

Sweet Emma

Cousins climbing our van

Little cousins attacking the big cousins

We also went a on big trip to Oregon and visited with lots of old friends.  We enjoyed seeing everyone there!  The children LOVED staying with Nana and Papa! We were sad when we realized that we didn't get any pictures of our time there.

After Oregon we went on to Idaho and visited with Timothy's family.  We had a good time visiting with all our family there!  The children LOVED playing with their cousins.  Again we were sad when we realized we got no pictures of our time there.  (I'll have to do better next time.)

Thank you to everyone who hosted us while we were traveling!  It was a blessing to spend time with you!

Sword Fight!

We've been trying to find ways for the children to get out their energy and be aggressive in productive and safe ways.  This is our latest battle...

Rebekah's about to jab Mommy

Now Brigham is attacking

Rebekah's trying with two swords

Daddy picked up a new kind of sword

Brigham knocked Daddy's sword out of his hand

Brigham ready to strike

Hyrum trying to beat Daddy

Rebekah's almost got Daddy down

Victory!  Daddy's down

Just another crazy day in our house.

Farm Camp

This summer the children had the opportunity to go to farm camp at a local farm for four weeks.  It was 3 hours a day 4 days a week.  They learned how to take care of the animals, learned all about what different animals eat, they caught frogs and tadpoles,  rode horses four different times, gathered eggs, learned how to milk a cow, drank fresh cows milk, played field games, planted pumpkins, rode on a tractor, and did all sorts of farm chores!  They loved it!

I only got a few pictures, and they're not very good, but here they are anyway.

At the end of each week the children did a show for the parents where they danced the chicken dance and told their favorite part of the week. 

They sure had a great time and gained a lot of skills and learned a lot about how farms work and where we get all our food from.  I'm so glad they got to do this!