All caught up! Seriously.

I've been posting like a maniac this weekend trying to get all caught up on my blogging while I had a little bit of time to do so, and I did it!  Make sure you check out all our fun posts from this summer!  Thanks for sticking with us and not giving up on me with getting so far behind. :)

Happy 9th Anniversary, Lovey!

Darwin and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary on August 12th.  Woo! Hoo!  It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun! :)  One of our favorite traditions we have for celebrating our anniversary is that we attend the temple, so we did--and this year we got to do it on our actual anniversary.  It's a great reminder for us to go and hear the words of our marriage covenants to remind us of the commitments we have made to each other.

At the Provo temple
(this is what the Ogden temple used to look like, just FYI)

On Thursday we celebrated some more by going to see Wicked in Salt Lake.  Totally worth it.  We LOVED it!

After the play we ventured back towards home and had dinner at the Chef's Table.  Yummy food!  And, as we were sitting there eating, Bob Bennett walked in and had dinner with his family there that night too--just a fun little tid-bit to remember for later on :)  Not quite as cool as when we got to shake hands with Elder Cook on our anniversary a few years ago, but still kind of fun.

Words can't express how much I love this man and how grateful I am to have him in my life.
Every. Single. Day!
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, BUNCHES!
I love you more than you know!

Feeding the Ducks...again.

The girls love going to feed the ducks, so whenever we have extra bread we take them to the pond.  This time we had our Aussies go with us.  Love you guys!

Mr. P showing me the cool feathers he found--Rori wouldn't stop for me to take a picture of hers.


After the bread was all gone they had lots of fun running around chasing each other and the ducks :)


This time as we were rounding things off and getting ready to head home, Tracee and I saw a rat!  It was kind of creepy and gross, but kind of cool all at the same time.

Sillyness.

One thing I love about our family is that we can be silly together.  Several months back (on our trip to Montana) Rori got a silly face sticker book.  You can make all sorts of silly faces on the pictures with the stickers.  Rori and Daddy decided one night to use them on themselves :)

Rori made a face on her tummy (after Daddy did it first) and was making her belly button "whistle" :)



It's a cute little belly face!

Savy didn't use any of the stickers (usually she just tries to eat them) but she sure had a good time making a mess eating our yummy fruit dip! Delish!

Good times :)

We {heart} Temples!

08.06.2014

One really neat thing that happens when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints builds a new temple is that they open it up to the public to tour before it is dedicated.  We jumped on the chance to take our girls inside a temple, because otherwise they can't enter the temple until they're 12 years old and worthy to do so.  The Ogden temple is the one I attended as a youth, so I was really excited to go and see how much it had changed with the reconstruction of it over the last few years.

It's an absolutely beautiful building!
Our family before going on our tour of the Ogden temple

You can't take pictures inside the temple, so we didn't.  I loved going through that beautiful building as a family, knowing the importance of temples and the work that takes place inside after it is dedicated.  We're trying to instill in our children the same love for temples that we have.  I'm so glad that Aurora tells us she wants to get married in the temple.  It's the best place to do it!

The girls took the lead of other kids outside and had to stick their hands in the water after our tour


Our family after the tour on the East side of the temple



Outside the temple is a tent with facts and other information about temples.  We didn't stay very long there because it was lunch time and the girls were tired and hungry.  We tried to get a cute picture of them with the Christus statue, but this was the best we got.

We ventured outside to find a place to eat and saw these painted horses all over town.  We only took pictures with a couple of our favorites--the space horse for Daddy :)

And the princess horse for the girls

We had a yummy lunch at Five Guys and then had to stick with tradition and get some ice cream at Farr's after attending the Ogden temple.  Delish!



I'm so glad we took the time to go attend the Ogden temple open house together as a family.  It was a long day, but so fun and definitely worth it!  It was fun to stop and say hi to my sister and her family on our way home too.  Thanks again for the yummy corn, Shan!

I'm so grateful for temples and know that because of what takes place in them we can be with our families for eternity--and we want to be a forever family!

A day at the lake (or maybe just an hour).

Sometimes I forget that we live so close to a lake.  We personally don't have any fun water toys, and honestly I don't think the water is that great, but it's a lake.  We wanted to introduce our girls to the lake one day so on August 2nd we packed them up and went for a drive.  We decided the next time we go we need to find a better part of the lake to hang out.  The "beach" we went to wasn't very beach-like but we made the most of it.  And it really was a beautiful view!

Luckily there were lots of rocks for the girls to throw into the water!

After a while we couldn't keep Savannah out of the water.  She LOVED it!  And the temperature was actually pretty nice!



The mountains in the distance looked like volcanoes with puffs of smoke coming :)
Rori stripped down and sampled the water too but wasn't as thrilled about it as Savannah was.

Popcorn on the blanket sounded like a better plan to Rori.

And Savy soon joined her :)


**A little side-note: we went through a car wash on our way home from the lake and it totally freaked the girls out.  They're a little sheltered because we usually wash our car by hand.  We got a kick out of it though. Silly girls.**

Rounding off July with the munchkins.

The big events we do each month are always fun, but I love capturing the fun of the little moments too.  With working as much as I did this summer (I don't really want to work full time in the summer again, at least not while my kids are so little still) I realized how important it is to slow down and enjoy your kids childhood before it slips away.  I know I'm way more uptight about things than I would like to be sometimes.  Part of it is my personality, part of it is frustration with little things we won't mention like potty training. Seriously though.  Life is too short and most of us need to to take more time to stop and smell the roses or sit down on the floor to play with our kids for an hour every day.  It doesn't sound like much, and it's hard sometimes with all the things on my "To Do" list, but I know that one hour of quality time with my kids on a daily basis will make a big difference in their lives as they get older.  I'm determined to recommit myself to being a better mom.  I don't want these little ones and these special moments to slip by and be lost in the busyness of life.

Darwin reminded me why he's the man of my dreams this summer (as he does every day in the little things he does) by swapping roles with me while I worked full time and he took care of the girls and the house.  He's amazing.  I love him.  One day he deep cleaned the kitchen and scrubbed the floor on his hands and knees.  Of course he had an awesome little helper ;)

We had a couple of really cool rain storms and Rori couldn't resist the opportunity to venture out and play in the rain!  Cutie!

If you don't know it already, our little Savannah Belle loves her sleep.  There were a couple of days that she just couldn't wait for me to get her down for a nap.  Poor little thing!



Vannah likes to help with the chores too.  She's great at sweeping and dusting :)

And she's our precious little princess too!

Oh, how I love to kiss those incredibly kissable cheeks!

I love that these two are such great friends!






Love these girls!!!
Happy July!