After getting back from Mexico on a Saturday night, Andrew's parents visited us the following Thursday through Monday. Andrew's Aunt Polly & Uncle Ed came out from Pennsylvania for the annual Rotary conference that was in SLC this year, & Sue & Maurice decided to come up from New Mexico to visit all of us at once. It was a very fun weekend of catching up. Here is a (dark) picture of all of us:
Here we are at our annual neighborhood parade: 
By the way, we now have the rockingest wagon ever! I will post a pic soon. We upgraded from the umbrellas to a canopy & added a Radio Flyer trailer. We're our own little parade tooling around the neighborhood. Riding in style!The other main excitement around here and source of much angst over the last few months is that we've put our house on the market. I certainly didn't anticipate selling our house quite this soon, but the only constant is change, right? Our main line of thought is that the market has already softened here (after a couple years of good appreciation) & will probably go downhill, as it has in the rest of the country. So, since we anticipate a move in the next year or so anyways, we'd rather bank our equity now than hang onto the house and risk losing a lot of moo-lah. So it may mean an extra move (yuck!) into a rental in the same neighborhood because we really like the neighborhood, or, depending on the job situation, a move back to something we buy in Colorado. We just don't want to own something we don't plan on staying in long-term right now.
Other than that, just lots of playgroups, playdates with Riley & Bailey at the splash pool, an end-of-year fun picnic for MOMS club, interviewing realtors, getting the house ready to sell, etc, etc. Tomorrow we are off to celebrate the 4th in Colorado. Utah's already into the 100's on a regular basis, so I was very excited to see Colorado's forecast in the mid-eighties & upper seventies. Yeah!
Oooh, and I also finally saw An Inconvenient Truth and Shut Up and Sing. Shut Up and Sing is a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and is only available at Blockbuster - I highly recommend it! Unbelievable what these ladies, who are also mothers and wives, have gone through. What sweetness to ultimately be proven right! So I then had to get their latest CD (I already had the previous two) & have been rocking out to it.
Ben cried the first time in the pool, but he warmed up a little bit everyday and was having a lot of fun by the end of the week. 
They loved seeing all of the lizards: big ones, medium ones, little ones, green ones, black ones, brown ones...always peeking out and scurrying away around the resort (sorry, no lizard pics). 
Every night we watched the sun sink into the ocean: "bye bye sun, see ya tomorrow." 
View from our hotel room:
Ben getting a good laugh about the surprise he just made for Dad:
Eating: 
The most fabulous discovery, Mango Daquiri:
And here they are showing Uncle Jordan some love too:
We had such a great time catching up with Becca & Jordan this weekend! We got in some shopping - we braved the crowds at the newly opened Ikea for about an hour Sunday morning. We wandered through this labyrinth of home stuff and then left with glazed looks on our faces. Sunday afternoon we made the rounds of stores they have missed while in Helena...Old Navy, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy...Every so often I pick up another book that I loved growing up for Max & Ben. Sunday's treasure was Tikki Tikki Tembo - I was so excited! And Becca got to read the story for the first time. (Recall her blog discussion about speech class & Tikki Tikki Tembo a while back :) .) Late Sunday afternoon, we all took a bike ride around Daybreak. 
And Sunday night, we introduced them to the Greatest Chicken Wings on Earth, Winger's! Delicious! Here they are, mouths watering, as they prepare for their first taste: 
Such a fun weekend & thanks again Becca & Jordan for making the trip!
And here are some of the boys - they love playing with their tracks! If you ask Ben what a train says, he has the cutest little baby version of "chugga chugga." 
And Happy Mother's Day to all the moms this weekend!
This Sunday it was much cooler, so no shorts around here. One week, I made sort of an offhand comment to Max that his cowboy shirt sure is handsome for church. So now it is the only shirt he will wear to church, and as soon as he gets home, he takes it off because it's only for church. The Sunday that this was taken, he wore it with shorts and cowboy boots. :) Whatever works.
and Andrew 
enjoying their "scrumptious and delicious" birthday blueberry pie - Andrew's favorite. (Poor little Ben is running a fever today & was already in bed so he didn't partake of the pie.)
Shrieks of joy with this big crazy water thing that they'd send ping-pong balls down the different tubes. 
Once this last walkway dries and the forms come off, I'll lay the last of the weed barrier and wood chips. Yeah!! Then the yard will be officially done.
Then we headed over to some other friends' house for dinner - Tiffany, Brian and their two kids, Riley and Bailey, ages 1 & 2 (Irish twins). They also live in Daybreak, about 6 blocks away. They are a really nice family that we just met at the park one day and have had a lot of fun getting to know. Plus, they're also Nuggets fans, so you know they're good people. Weirdly enough, Brian and I both graduated from Heritage (he was 5 years ahead of me though). They move around a lot with Brian's job, a tunnel engineer, but for now, we've all landed in Utah. That's it around here for now!
Shorter in back with great layers, longer in front:
I love it! Thanks Holly!
Max likes to open each egg and check the treat inside before putting it in his basket. I'm sure he'll learn the more efficient "hoard now, check treats later" method at some point, but for now it's kind of sweet to see them not so competitively picking up eggs. For example, there were no body-checks. 
And I don't know what to say about this picture except that it cracks me up:
