Recently, my friend Jenalee posted pictures from her phone on her blog.  Because I'm too lazy to come up with my own brilliant idea, I thought I would use pictures from my phone to

explain what we have been up to lately.

Seriously basketball has overtaken our life.  Fortunately for me, we have a break for a few months. 

Happy for me, sad for the kids.

Chris can't always watch the games, so he gets pictures of the final scores.  We won this game by the way. 

Sam's team won the city championship and she had the bruises to prove it. It was a great season.

After two years Justin finally got his braces off.  

He received some awesome BSU face paint as an award for brushing his teeth.

Check out that expensive grill.

My kids leave me notes and pictures of their wish lists. It is really helpful when I go shopping.

Then I send pictures to Chris to make sure I'm buying the right thing.

 Sam sends pictures of the boots that she is obsessed with.  

And the shoes that she obviously doesn't want.

I send her pictures of the shoes I want to buy to see if she likes them.

I use my phone to take pictures of my craft projects.  

I made that handy dandy stocking holder because I was really sick of our old ones falling and breaking.  They had been hot glued together too many times. Super happy with the new one.

I made lots of love rocks for handouts for New Beginnings.

Do you feel the love?

I made this cute sign for a wedding present.  

I'm loving the texture.

Thanks to Pinterest, I have been redoing furniture.  

This is the before and almost after pictures of the first table I worked on.

Dark brown matches the rest of my furniture so much better.

I also found these really cute mask templates on Pinterest.

I'm sure nobody would believe the amount of superheros that come through my house. 

Luckily I had my phone handy to capture proof. I haven't been quick enough to photograph Spiderman and Iron Man, but they are both regular visitors too.

I better get back to cleaning up my mess.  

There is saw dust all over the kitchen and I am totally not going to take a picture of it.

I really wish superheros were better at cleaning.

Volleyball

I know I have a million things to blog about, but I was looking at old pictures Sam pulled out for a school project and I realized that things change a lot in four years.  It is kind of freaking me out that she is a FRESHMAN this year.  How much is going to change in the next four years?

4th Grade Summer Volleyball and 8th Grade Varsity

Girls Camp Surprise

I went to Girls Camp this year and it was so much fun.  Chris went to high adventure and was only a few miles down the road.  However, we were without cell service and without a plan.  When I realized that the bishopric were going to be coming from high adventure to girls camp on Thursday night, I thought "wouldn't it be cool if Chris came too."  Then I thought, "yeah right, don't get your hopes up. It probably won't even cross his mind to come."  I mentioned it to one of my friends and when she saw Chris sneaking up on us, she was kind enough to snap a few photos.  I thought they turned out really cute.  I really love the look of surprise on Sam's face.

School Photos

Holy cow my kids are growing up so fast!!!

I know that I didn't look this cute in 8th grade. Sam is gorgeous!

Justin only has one more year left with braces.

Devyn is so sweet.

Not much irritates me more than when my kids make goofy faces on purpose when it isn't time to be goofy. If I have to go through the effort of retakes, then I will post your obnoxious photo.

Luckily the retakes turned out much better. Hopefully Tanner learned his lesson this year.

Fall Football

We spend a lot of time, energy and money for football.

This was Tanner's first year playing tackle football.

He is a Blue Sky Bagel Charger

Devyn is a TetraTech Titan.

This is his second year of tackle football.

I can't find his pictures, but I will upload them when I do.

Justin is an RST Fundraising Viking. This is his third year of tackle football. He thought he would be super funny and pretend to be asleep in his group photo. He should know by now that if you annoy me by messing up your photos, then I will post them on-line and show everyone that I possibly can so that you never do it again.

Here is a close up in case you can't see it properly

My afternoons were spent watching volleyball games, my evenings were spent at football practice and my Saturdays were spent watching three football games. Since they all wear different colors, I had to pack a bag with all three shirts and change in between each game. We were really lucky when they all played at the same location, it was very difficult when they were all playing games in different towns. Luckily it is over for now. It takes me most of the year to gear up for the next season. Only nine years left of Optimist Football!

What did we do the rest of the summer?

We bought a raft and spent most of our time on the river.

It is a really big raft.

The Rest of the Vacation . . . Jared was scared

We rode the dinosaur train to SIX FLAGS

Jared loved riding the airplane

Jared hated this ride so much that it took all of my coaxing to get him to ride anything else the rest of the day. The other boys didn't seem to mind it so much. Jared still hates this ride.

The swings were fun

Sami and Chris spent the day going on the scariest rides they could

We had loads of fun here, we just wished it stayed open longer.

The Academy of Science was very cool with scary dinosaur bones

an albino alligator and albino snapping turtles

and according to Jared, the scariest of all, a presentation with a diver about fish. He hates the loud noises from the microphone during any presentations.

He spent the whole time asking, "is it over yet?"

The aquarium was very small, but the star fish were fun to touch

Maybe we should leave Justin under water? Our world was much quieter

We took the kids to the Rain Forest Cafe

They sat us by a really scary elephant, Jared hated it

Granted it looked kind of evil and when it blew out air and stamped its foot, it looked even creepier

By the end of dinner, he liked it a little better and realized that it wasn't that scary

We had a great family vacation