Rylee's Seventh Birthday!

 Rylee had a wonderful birthday celebrating with family and enjoying our birthday traditions! She wanted to do a "beach party" theme for her birthday because she wanted to get little umbrellas for the cups and have coconut water (which she ended up not liking haha). We did her party with family the day before (on Sunday night) and she had a blast. 

One of our traditions is doing 12 days of little gifts leading up to their birthdays. The first day was a cake mix and Rylee had so much fun making and decorating her cake. 

Her "beach party" table! 

Rylee loved her cake (Ashtyn made the cake and then Ben helped me decorate it because I was nervous about messing it up). 

These three girls are so cute!

We had fun making some decorations together and setting everything up.

Another thing we do for decorations is the kids color pictures leading up to the party and then we hang them up on the wall. 

When you are invited to a beach party 🩷

I love them!

We got her Barb the Last Berserker and she was so excited! 

Happy birthday to Rylee! 

For her birthday date with Mom and Dad, she wanted to do a cereal party after everyone else was in bed and watch a movie while eating cereal with us. On the morning of her birthday, I made homemade donuts (I would like to retire that tradition because it's a lot of work on top of everything else we do for birthdays, but the kids were so sad when I suggested doing something different) and she played with cousins (who were staying with us that weekend). Then I took her with me when I went to do my pickup and we went into the store to let her pick out a new kind of cereal to try. She picked Fruit Loops with Marshmallows 😂 I didn't even know that was a thing. 

After the pickup, we all went over to Lindi's house to swim in the pool with cousins (specifically requested by Rylee as part of her "beach party") and brought Papa Murphy's pizza (also requested by Rylee). We also had leftover cake and I'd made rice krispie treats. 

When we got home, we put the other kids to bed and watched The Karate Kid. I had tried to get it from the library, but apparently there is a remake of it and I got the wrong one (I had only checked to make sure I was getting the first one and not a sequel), so we ended up renting it online. Rylee LOVED the movie, it was cute, and she made it through (barely) without falling asleep. She loved the cereal party. 

It was a fun birthday for her and we loved celebrating her!

Family FUN in JULY 2025!

July was a fun month, but it literally went by so fast. I've never had a summer go by as fast as this one, and July was the fastest of all. We had a fun trip out for the fourth of July to visit my family, did some fun summer things, and just enjoyed/survived life with a baby.  

I love how much Oliver loves Leah 🩷

When we got home from our Fourth of July trip, our AC went out. It was hot! It was a weekend and we got through a couple nights with the windows open, and managed to get someone out on Monday afternoon. I loved the people we got to come out! They came that day and fixed the problem very inexpensively (we thought it was a different problem, which would have been thousands and instead it was under $200). 

Every night, Ben tells Oliver a story before bedtime. He was getting tired of making up stories and started telling him the story from different movies and books. Awhile ago, he told him the story of the original Star Wars trilogy. When it got to the part where Luke says, "You killed my father!" and Darth Vader says, "No Luke, I am Your Father", Oliver's mouth dropped open. It was cute. Because of that, we started watching the Star Wars movies. We watched the first one as a family, but Oliver really wanted to do a "boys only" movie night (after the girls and I had a couple of girls' nights). He and Ben went to watch the second Star Wars with Donovan and Kolson. 

While they had their boys night, we hung out after piano lessons at Lindi's and watched Anne of Green Gables. We had just finished the book (which the girls loved) and it was SO fun to watch the movie with them and to see how much they loved Gilbert 😍

It ended up being good that we decided to watch the movie instead of swimming, because it POURED. 

Oliver loves riding with Grandpa 🩷

Parker loves making houses at the library and then taking pictures of them.

Leah loves her cousin Lizzy 🩷

Ashtyn and Elizabeth went to the library during a time when kids can sell items. They worked HARD (they were running around asking people to buy things) and only sold a couple things each, making just a couple dollars. It was not a great experience in that way, but they had fun and learned they don't want to do that again.

Oliver fell asleep with Grandpa and Jonathan got a little jealous, so he went and was pretending to be asleep too 😂

These boys love to run around together.

They love to go out and catch frogs and things at the creek.

The kids' concerts 🩷

We love Augustine!

These boys are just so sweet.

We love cousins so much.

Having fun in the pool! All summer long.

The creek has a lot of cow bones and the kids love to collect them.

Oliver loves super heroes right now.

We have been wanting to get Oliver a mattress for awhile now and we decided to move the spare queen mattress we already had upstairs for him. I had to film his reaction, he was so excited.

Ashtyn updating her Goodreads account with all the books she read that week 😂

A little picnic!

I love putting food on a tray for kids.

And some nature notebooks. We started having the kids keep a nature notebook and once a week, I try to take them somewhere they can find new things to add. 

Oliver playing 🩷

I love seeing my kids reading together.

Catching butterflies!

I tried a new recipe, and most people didn't like it, but Rylee did and even came up with suggestions to make it better!

The kids went through a phase where they were sifting dirt 

to make their own sandbox in the little pool.

Ashtyn made this cool 3D Alex from Minecraft out of perler beads.

Parker's lunch 😂

Rylee did a one-day theater class and somehow I lost the pictures and videos. Luckily, I had these shared on Facebook that I could pull. She was so cute performing.

I love nursing babies.

Church buddie 🩷

Leah also rolled over for the first time! I was trying to catch her rolling over again here (she'd done it twice before I got my phone out), but she couldn't quite get there.

Oliver put this on her and said she was "super baby" haha

When church tucks you out.

Because of rolling over, we stopped swaddling her. She did really well with the transition (her naps suffered the most at first). Of course, as soon as we unswaddled her, she stopped rolling over for awhile 😂

Leah was struggling with sleep and we couldn't figure out what was going on. Ben was playing with her and her upside down and saw this on her neck. I guess it's a common thing with babies, it happens because the skin rubs combined with the drool :( it was so sad. We started putting stuff on it and she started sleeping better. It has gone away, but I try to keep an eye on it now. 

When the first thing you hold is a pickleball 🩷

We love Leah!

We had such a great month in July with lots of fun memories together.