Summertime

My favorite season ever is hands down Summertime in Idaho.

It's warm enough to go swimming and be outside, but there is usually a breeze, and rarely (if ever) gets above 90 degrees. I can go biking with the kids, there is a stellar splash pad at the nearby park, and endless outdoor activities.

One of our favorite pastimes is to take daily excursions to the playground at our apartment community:

Is it just me, or does it look like I suddenly have a 17 year old??

Comparing lollipop tongue colors ;)

That Idaho sky, tho...

Little handsome :D

This past month has been incredibly packed with fun things to do, exploring new places, and having our niece come to visit from California. :)

One of my greatest accomplishments in June was that I finally made a new wreath for our front door:

Front entryway be like WHAT??! New wreath, new doormat, AND flowers in a cute pot? Heck yeah. Homemaking success.

The kids also took swim lessons in June from the local community pool/water park:

It was so fun for us to see Kate gain new skills and be more confident in the water. She loved the Nemo water plush toy they got to practice with, and singing, "I'm a little pancake" when they learned how to float.

Kate's teacher, Chelsea, was such a sweetheart. Kate absolutely adored her, and still asks if we can go back and play with her all the time. :)

Brave little man jumping into the pool:

Blowing bubbles with daddy:

*Pop* goes the weasel!

Edwin had a mommy-and-me class which Jon was able to participate in quite a bit. Wynn told me his favorite songs to do in the water were: "If you're happy and you know it" and "Motorboat". :)

June also brought Father's Day celebrations complete with pictures and muffins for the Bishop, and molten chocolate lava cakes for our dessert!

 I was so happy that these turned out since it was my first time making them.

We've been able to spend lots of time outside this month, which has resulted in an abundance of sidewalk art and me getting gloriously tan ;)

Our garden is also coming along nicely. The kids love to help us water each morning and check for weeds and new blossoms on the plants:

Kate's potty skills are going strong! She still has a sticker chart up in the bathroom (just for when she really feels like she needs a reward, haha) but the coolest part was when she wrote her name for the first time ALL BY HERSELF. I know the letters are sort of out of order. She started with a solid K, then drew an A (that looks more like a Q) and realized she was running out of room so she worked her way to the left with a T and then a loopy E that sort of resembles a deflated balloon. But the point is that she remembered what we have worked on together, and she DID it without any coaching! This was a proud parent moment, for sure.

At the beginning of July our niece AnnMarie came to visit from California. Jon's brother Mike and our sister-in-law Amanda were awesome to drive her all the way out here to spend a couple weeks with us. :) Kate was SO excited to have AnnMarie sleeping over in her room. It was all she talked about for weeks!

When AnnMarie arrived, we went to The Burg for dinner and met Jon at Porter Park to show the other Alstons some of Rexburg:

Kate could not contain her excitement and hardly slept at all that night. She just wanted to be with AnnMarie constantly!

The next day was 4th of July prep, grocery shopping, and playtime at Porter Park!

Edwin really wanted to splatter paint at the bottom of his shirt like the girls:

The poor little guy was so wiped out by the afternoon, he just slept in his stroller at the park:

That night we enjoyed the sunset while watching the neighbors launch fireworks.

AnnMarie was able to bring her bike on vacation and loved riding it around the field. Mike and Amanda surprised Kate with her very own bike as an early birthday present! I just love the look on Kate's face as she tried so hard to keep her eyes closed. :)

Stunned...

Her very own bike!

We've been working with Kate on learning to ride. It has training wheels, but her little legs are still a bit short for the pedals. ;)

On Sunday Mike and Amanda headed back to California. AnnMarie and I went out for an early morning drive before the kids were up and checked out all the farms surrounding Rexburg:

We girls had a makeup and hair party before church :D

Then we took a picnic up to the Rexburg Temple for lunch. There was SO much wind that day we had to modify it into a back-of-the-car picnic :D

Jon also handmade this really pretty journal for AnnMarie to use during her trip. I remember finding a love for journaling close to her age, and we hoped that she would put all her best memories from Idaho in here to take home with her. :)

Again, the day's festivities were just too much for little Edwin, who we found passed out that afternoon on AnnMarie's bed in the kid's room ;)

We started our 4th of July on Monday morning with the parade in downtown Rexburg:

The girls all got to wear red lipstick!

And we got to sit with our friends, the Sansoucie's :D

Kate wanted AnnMarie to hold her pretty much the whole time she was here...

Handsome boy!

The kids spent most of the parade time hunting for candy that was tossed from the floats passing by. I was really impressed that they made it through the whole parade with great spirits and attitudes!

The candy haul. Better than Halloween!

That afternoon I biked with the girls over to Porter Park while Jon and Edwin stayed home to nap.

Snowcones and cupcakes! (You can tell where Kate's loyalties lie...)

Pink mermaid hair!

It was a breezy day at the playground with some intense clouds overhead! But still a perfect afternoon to be outside.

That evening we got all dolled up with colored hair chalk and glitter for fireworks in Idaho Falls! These following pictures really sum up Kate's personality right now...

My mom was able to come with us too. It is so great getting to spend holidays with Gram!

 We brought a classic 4th of July dinner of spaghetti and meatballs with us to the Snake River. HAHA

Then the kids got to open surprise 4th of July presents!

I picked up these glow flags from the Dollar Tree so that they had some fun things to wave around during the firework show :D

The kids entertained themselves with some pretty crazy snapchats while we waited for the show to start:

Meanwhile, Edwin was looking handsome as ever. "Ladies..."

Our view was pretty spectacular, even before the fireworks started.

"America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea."

The next few days were a lot more calm without running around to events and fireworks! Since Jon had to work all week, the kids and I planned great activities to occupy our time.

I snapped this awesome picture from around the corner while Kate and AnnMarie laid in the living room eating cookie dough and reading together Tuesday morning. :) It's probably one of my favorite moments from the whole trip.

On July 5th we celebrated my mom's 61st birthday!
(not pictured: Kate, who passed out early)

Having my mom living close has been such a nice blessing. We get to see her more often and celebrate with her! Kate and Edwin love their Gram :D

On Wednesday we decided to go to the Zoo! The girls got matching hairstyles:

And their coordinating black shirts and blue visors were part of a police game they were playing throughout the week. AnnMarie has a great imagination, and decided to have her bike all decorated with construction paper signs and lights, along with a mini license plate she designed that said "Idaho Kid Police" on it. She wanted Kate and Edwin to match with her, and wear police uniforms. So I took them to the Dollar Tree where they found matching shirts and visors to wear. The plan was to paint them (I think inspired by the 4th of July t-shirt project), but we had so much fun doing other things that we never got around to it, haha. :)

I even got into the fun of dressing for the Zoo with a side braid ;)

At the Zoo we got to see lots of fun animals! We talked about what they eat, how they take care of themselves, and the places they like to live in the wild.

The wild "stone tiger". Very elusive.

At the Idaho Falls Zoo they have a little chicken playground which Kate is obsessed with!

My little chickens!

Petting goats:

Along with the animal sightings pictured above, we also saw monkeys, giant tortoises, fed the ducks, watched the penguins, saw bears, camels, lions, crocodiles, and a HUGE python eating a 15lb rabbit. I won't include the picture for this blog post, but seriously it was one of the most simultaneously fascinating and borderline disturbing things I have ever witnessed.

The highlight of the day was the photo booth :) I just wanted the kids to have cousin pictures together. They got to pick the animal on their photo strip, and then I coached them a little for each pose HAHA. First smiling, then funny faces, then kissy lips, then at the end I asked them to hug (intending on a group hug), but instead they all gave themselves bear hugs! I laughed pretty hard at that one ;)

The photo booth was perfect and automatically prints 3 photo strips together, so each of the kids got to keep one! $5 well spent.

Not pictured: watching Zootopia that night in the theater room at our apartment clubhouse with a gigantic bowl of popcorn ;)

On Thursday Jon taught the girls some simple bookbinding techniques:

I don't know why this picture came out sideways. Anyhow, this is AnnMarie's finished and decorated scrapbook that she made with Jon and Kate, next to the journal Jon made for her visit, and the printed snaps that I gave her to take home from the 4th of July. :)

That afternoon we went to Rexburg Rapids for some water park fun! Gram got to come along, too. :)

Rexburg Rapids is sort of like a mini Sunsplash (for any friends in California). There isn't a big arcade and mini golf, but they have a concession stand, a lazy river, a couple water slides, a pool with lanes, a rock climbing wall that comes out of the big pool, and a shallow area with a water playground for smaller kids.

Kate, Edwin, and AnnMarie waded around, exploring together. This was the best picture I could get of the three of them, even though Kate and Edwin were totally distracted with all the water and kids around HAHA

I just love this one of them all holding hands:

That night we had Little Caesar's pizza for dinner and went up to BYUI campus for a bit. Back at home we watched the Lego Movie and ate mango ice cream out of fancy bowls :D

Instax for AnnMarie to take home in her scrapbook:

AnnMarie went back to California the next morning. Kate and Edwin already miss her a ton! Since we didn't end up going to Yellowstone this weekend, our little family had a weekend staycation and participated in a luau lunch party at our apartment community, and went bike riding to feed the ducks at our local Nature Park. :) But I'll save those pictures for another time.

Year Of America: Less than a month!

We are less than a month away from our Year of America departure date, and plans are in full swing!

While I haven't been talking about it much lately, this trip takes up most of my daily thought. It is a slow going large project, which has its own designated folder on my computer desktop of ideas, camping hacks, packing lists, menus, itineraries for each state, and maps. I also have a Pinterest board of cool things to see and car trip ideas for kids. Slowly I have been sifting through these articles and picture posts to find exactly what will work best for our little family. :)

I now have road trip specific calendars hanging on our pantry door in the kitchen so that our whole family knows when we are leaving, and where we will be on each day. Together we made a paper chain link countdown so that we know visually how many days are left until the big road trip :D

cute, and mildly terrifying...

This week we also started a list of all the crafts and projects we want to make for our car ride to be more enjoyable. Starting any of these before now just seemed silly because a) I would need to store them somewhere, and b) I didn't want the kids to get REALLY excited 3 months ago and then lose interest by the time the road trip actually got here. So we spent most of the last few months making lists and gathering ideas, and now we are finally going out to purchase things and make stuff.

The whole point of making the Year of America our family theme for 2016 was so that we could spend time bonding together in a unique way, while seeing many parts of the country that we have never been to. The last thing I want is for this 3 week car experience to feel like torture, or have us rolling our eyes and wishing that we had thought of "this" or "that" because we are miserable and want to go home early. My ideal would be that we have a simple and stress-free vacation where everyone is comfortable, warm enough, cool enough, full of yummy food, hydrated, happy and entertained, loving each other, and that all of our supplies are easily accessible and nothing gets lost. :D Ahhh, that's the dream!

While Pinterest is full of LOTS of ideas, I wanted to be realistic about how much time and money I was spending to create hours of toddler-car-ride-entertainment, and I also wanted to create things that would entertain them repeatedly for long periods of time, not just a "once and now this bores me" type of situation. I also didn't want anything sticky or potentially melty, and the activities had to be age appropriate because my kids can't spell or read yet, and their imagination is great only within reason. (I didn't want Kate to get frustrated with having to stay in the lines, or reading coloring prompts when she basically just draws jellyfishes and scribbles on everything.) She also can't do bingo or alphabet challenges on her own, so hands-on, tactile, and snack oriented games definitely sounded more appealing.

Here is what we have planned so far to make our road trip enjoyable for everyone:

A prize box. Ahead of time I will be wrapping small prizes that we can open as we go. Some will be individual things (like play-doh or sidewalk chalk), and others will be family goodies (like giant bubble wands or U.S. Flash Cards). I found this great idea for DIY scratch off cards for the trip, so each day they will scratch off a picture of where we are going to go and when we get there and the kids "FIND" the landmark, we will open a prize!

I also found this Car Scavenger Hunt which is something we can do all together as a family, and whoever points out each item will get a snack. :D Once the whole sheet is full we will unlock a prize to open for the trip. (I am laminating all this stuff because I especially like activities that are reusable!)

Calming Bottles. I found lots of recipes for these online. They are bottles full of goo that you shake and then watch as they "calm down". We are planning to do a couple with glitter and one with alphabet beads or little toys to play "I Spy".

Personalized Plastic Tubs. This one is REALLY important to me. Each kid will have their own plastic tub with a lid on it to keep their own toys, snacks, stickers, and activities in. This way there is no fighting over what belongs to whom, the car stays less cluttered, and Kate and Wynn are responsible for their own clean up each day.

Snack Necklaces. The day before we go, the kids will get to make necklaces with pretzels and cheerios to eat and wear in the car :D I'm hoping this will help them be less messy without loose snacks everywhere ;) I can dream.

Binoculars. This week we will be making binoculars out of toilet paper rolls. The kids can look for things extra well with their own personalized spy goggles! Paint and stickers, here we come.

What types of activities and games do you play with your family on long car trips?

Thankfully we will only be on the road 3-4 hours each day, so nothing incredibly long at one time, but still. Being in the car and away from home every day is going to be a challenge. Tell me your ideas! :D