Counting Down the Days.....

We are BEYOND DONE with school! Seriously we have been counting down for several weeks now. The kids kept telling me how many Mondays were left because 5 Mondays didn't sound too bad.....4 sounded even better....and here we are with NO MONDAYS LEFT!! We get out in just 2 days and CANNOT WAIT!! With school ending comes all of the end of the year stuff.  They have been doing field trips and plays and parties all week!

 Dallin's 4th grade play was today.  Don't even ask me how my kid ended up being Rapunzel in the play??!! He probably volunteered for it! Ha, ha! That would be something Dallin would do! :) Here is his teacher helping me get a picture.  Dallin had a good year this year and he made a great Rapunzel too.

Here is Laiklie showing me that she got to sign the 5th wall.  These are for AR reading with the big kids, but they let the kindergartners sign them as they pass off their sight words.  Laiklie passed them all off so she got to sign all 5 walls.  Yay! I can't believe my baby is getting so big. I am going to be lost next year when she goes to school all day. Here daddy is not going to know what to do without his feeding buddy either.  What a special little thing she is!

Branding Cows 2013

 It's that time of year again. 

 BRANDING!

We branded our cows yesterday.  Here is Dale and Ryan doing their thing.

 And here is my little helper Laiklie....she is plugging her nose. :) That branding smell is sure nasty!  (Sorry the pictures are so bad.  That is what happens when the computer flips a vertical picture horizontal.)

And here she is rockin' her shades and her footie pj's while branding.  She is my girl for sure! :)

Blackeyes and Loose Teeth

While I was in Utah this weekend with Oakley, Ryan kept the boys and took them with him on a scout campout.  I noticed that night when I got home that Dallin had a blackeye.

 He has NO IDEA how he got it. :) Ha, ha! I think every scout camp out ends with someone having a blackeye.  Right?!!

Laiklie also had a super, super loose tooth when I got home.  She wouldn't let my friend Hollie's husband pull it while she was staying at their house.  She said she was going to let Uncle Chase pull it.  My kids LOVE their uncles. :)  I ended up wrapping a string around it Sunday morning during breakfast and handing her both ends of the string.  We just crossed them and pulled and out popped the tooth.  I love the little gap she has now. So cute!

Last Volleyball Tourney

Oakley's team played their last volleyball tournament this past weekend in Utah.  We are SOOOO GLAD to be done driving back and forth between here and Utah every other weekend!! It was SO FUN to watch her learn and grow this spring.  Oakley's team started with NO COACH and we were grateful when this cute little senior in high school, Mandi, stepped up to do the job.

 Oakley learned a lot of patience this year with club volleyball.  She would get SO FRUSTRATED sometimes with her team.  Oakley LOVES volleyball and she gives it 110% everytime she steps on that court....at practice or a game.  That doesn't mean Oakley is the best on the team, it just means I don't know if anybody wanted to be there more than my girl!  She would come home in tears some nights after practice because some of the girls didn't want to be there and didn't give their 100%.  She learned a lot through all of this.  The season ended kind of weird.  We had no coach on Friday night and so I ended up having to coach for a couple of games.  Thank goodness for one of our other coaches who stepped in to help me. AH!!  We also only had 6 players so no back-ups....and 1 of the 6 had just gotten her cast off her arm 2 days before the tournament and hadn't been to practice for 2 months. :) Interesting!!!

 Saturday their coach was there and we had a 7th girl show-up and they all played their guts out.

 Oakley serving - she had GREAT serves that day!

and spiking! :)

Oakley is a good little athlete and has come so far for just having started one year ago.  We are very proud of her!

Chase and Yvonne

Ryan's little brother Chase got married on Monday, May 13, 2013.  He married Yvonne and that also added her two precious girls, Saige and Violet to our family. We are so excited for Chase and Yvonne and can't wait to get to know her and her girls better.  The wedding was beautiful.

 This is Ryan, his siblings and parents. What a blessing it is to have his family as mine.

 Here are the little girls - Laiklie, Ciara, Kiana, Macady/Paityn and Oakley.  We are missing Yvonne's girls who were taking other pictures.

And here are the big men.  :) Love them! Dallin, JD and Rhett

It was a short, sweet and to the point wedding.  Chase called me just an hour before we were suppose to leave to the wedding and said:

C: Hey, Natalie, Where are you?
Me: Home
C: Do you have an iron?
Me: Yep.....do you need something ironed?
C: Ya, my shirt.  Plug it in....I will be right up!

Ha, ha! He cracks me up! He needed a wife! :) Congratulations Chase! We sure love you!

Lagoon 2013

We went to Lagoon again this year for the America On Stage Clogging Nationals.  Oakley danced all afternoon Friday.  She did 9 individual dances and then decided she wanted to try the dance off that evening and re-danced 3 of her individual dances.  So she danced 12 dances that day.  She was exhausted and her knees where killing her by the time she was finished.

 She came home Friday with 5 first places and 4 second places.  Not quite as good as she was hoping for but still INCREDIBLE!! She is such a good little dancer.  On things like this you are seriously just at the mercy of the judge you are standing infront of and you never know what it is that that particular judge is looking for.  You win some, you lose some.  Either way she loves it and she keeps pushing forward and we will be back next year!

Saturday she did her two team dances and they got 1st places on both of those as well.  We were finished dancing by 9:30 am and rides opened at 10 am.  PERFECT!!

 The only thing that wasn't perfect for the weekend was this sweet little girl woke-up in the middle of the night Friday night in her grandma's hotel room and threw-up.  My poor Laiklie gets the throw-ups more often than any of my kids.  She must just have a sensitive stomach.  Poor thing! Poor grandma as well.  She apparently tried texting me and I had just been up to check Oakley's blood and got the text....but only got the part of the text that said, "she is fine." I thought it was weird and went back to bed.  So grandma took care of the sickie.  She was dragging all day Saturday and didn't feel great....but do you think we could keep her off the rides?

NOPE!! She went on ride after ride.  Every time we would get on one I would tell her where to throw-up if she was going to throw-up.  I didn't want me, her or anyone else covered in it! :( On one ride that was a super spinney ride I asked if her tummy was okay and she said, "It's much better now that I am on this ride!" She is hilarious!  She felt much better as the day went on thank goodness!  We all had a blast with cousins and the weather was beautiful.  We couldn't have asked for a better weekend and we are SO PROUD of all the hard work Oakley put in that took us to Nationals to begin with!

The Day Poop Flew

This spring has been one of the windiest yet.  The wind blows here ALOT...but this past month has seriously been more than I can handle.  I HATE THE WIND!  I have raked my yard 3 times this spring already and yesterday we had 60 mph winds AGAIN!

About 2 weeks ago the wind blew like crazy and our trampoline ended up in the tree and crumpled up and I ended up having straw blow over from the pasture into my yard.  What a mess!! The wind from 2 weeks ago was NOTHING like yesterday though!

 This is the mess I found when I went out to rake this afternoon.  I WISH you could see how bad it really is.  There is seriously thick, thick dirt, straw and COW POOP all over my yard.  We have lived here 13 1/2 years and NEVER had poop fly from the pasture all the way across the driveway into the yard. 

 I raked and raked and raked today.  You can see Laiklie even got in on the action for as long as her little arms could go.  Because the straw was mixed with dirt and poop it was very heavy to rake and made my arms and body ache.  We finally could see more grass than dirt tonight as I came in just after finishing as it started to SNOW! Seriously!!

Our trampoline now looks like this. :(  This is what happened to it after the last wind storm and we straightened it back out and the kids went back to jumping on it.  Yesterday we pulled in the driveway just in time to see it take flight.  AH!!! It landed in one of our big pine trees and the kids ran and got Ryan to help me tie it down. We got it tied down, but on a pretty long rope and not long after it was completely air born on the end of the rope like a kite.  It flew over and thumped the house a couple of times before Ryan, my dad and brother Cody went and shortened the rope.  Hopefully we can get it straightened back out and figure out a way to keep it from flying every time the wind blows. 

I am praying we are finished with the wind for a VERY LONG TIME!! I would be totally cool with that!