The Garden Party!

My sister Rebecca and I decided to have a Anne of Green Gables inspired Garden party with her sister in laws and a few friends. It was so much fun to plan and set up and decorate! She and my mom did an amazing job on the food!
We all talked and laughed and admired all the cute babies that where there! I took like 5 hundred pictures of all the little ones which I will put into a different post. I am hoping to borrow my sisters Photoshop to make sure all the kiddos look the best they can!

the "chandelier" is a wreath that i covered in flowers and draped strands of pearls on. I had a more elaborate "chandelier" planned but time and $$$ where against me and in the end this worked great and was easy.

Aside from the food ingredients, we didn't buy anything for this party we just used old scraps of fabric to cover the chairs and napkins we already had on hand. 

the silhouette place cards are just old book pages that i hand painted the silhouettes onto, i just free handed them. 

oh he is SO my son, taking pictures for fun the whole time! Just like his mama!

a few more zoo pictures

The Rest of last weekend and up through today, summer break

So last weekend we pretty much ran a ton of errands and made sure that we kept the house clean and the kids happy. We went to several more parks, grocery shopping and of course Church. We went to grandma and grandpas after church which was a lot of fun for the kids! I also made some down time for myself to do some big catch up on my reading! I have read so many awesome book lately and even just this weekend. So nice! Also Mitchell and I are reading a book together so we spent some time doing that too. (Books I read this last week or so include several by Sarah Addison Allen, I also read and enjoyed the School Of Essential Ingredients, Hiking Through, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, A million Little Ways, Mindfulness Revolution, The Biography of Howard W Hunter, As You Are, and, His Needs Her Needs.)
This week we have pretty much gone to the library the park, cleaned painted, tried to keep spiders from overtaking our yard. Done some smaller projects. Mitchell was able to go Golfing and i did have a "girls night" where my running buddy and i decided to meet in the evening while the hubby's golfed and do P90X.
I am trying to up my running routine in hopes of reaching my half marathon goal with better success since i was plateauing for a while.
I painted the two upstairs bathrooms yesterday and they are so much fresher feeling now i cant believe i waited so long to do it!

Today we went to Great grandma and grandpa west's house and then we went with a whole bunch of cousins to the Babby Farms Zoo and Petting zoo. The kids had SO MUCH FUN! It is so nice for them to be near family!

We decided this week to sign up Eli for Preschool, we originally had decided not too because of $$$ but we realized that since we do not have a lot of kids his age around here that we know we needed to do something for him.

The Babby farms was really very cool they had bison and yaks and Zebras and Kangaroos and wallobys and all sorts of crazy fun animals most of whom you can pet or feed. The bison obviously you don't even touch the cage and the Zebra will bite you unless your feeding it (it does not just like to be petted) but it was a really fun place and we had a great time. Wednesdays are discount days if you bring donations for the food bank or salvation army you get 1/2 off regular admission!

Summer Break-Friday

yesterday (Friday) Mitchell and i went on a date!
at 8AM my brother J came to babysit and Mitchell and I headed to Hulls Gulch to go on a hike!
we had an awesome time the loop we took was 6.8 miles and we ended up running about 2 of them (trail running is SO FUN!) we had an amazing time just the 2 of us. after our awesome hike/ trail run we waled around downtown Boise until we found some place to eat (Costa vida-we had a coupon for a free meal!).
M man I loved spending time with you, hiking (especially trail running) with you was my favorite.

This is us trying to take a picture on M's phone while facing the sun. did not work out the best. but still worked

here both of us are trying really hard not to squint our eyes while facing the sun....

yes he is that awesome

and see how awesome i can try to be 

another bridge (the hike had 4 or 5 without water running below it. too late in the summer i guess

And yes i carried the day pack 75 % of the way because i am tough like that- and because then i had prime access to the water bottles....
On our hike we talked about our family goals and theme and the future. It was great. I do love that husband of mine!It felt so good to hike together and talk uninterrupted it was two of my most favorite things ever together! *Happiness sigh*
thanks for the great hike hon, lets do it again really soon ( pretty please).

oh and lest you think we left out our children let me assure you that we did make sure that we did some fun things with the kids last night, like going to that park and pulling them in the wagon and having a BBQ (courtesy of M man) the kids always love eating outside :) .

Summer vacation-Thursday

Thursday was also a fun day, after the busyness of the night before we were all tired so we slept in. Except me because i got up at 5:30 to run. When everyone else woke up we all helped make a delicious breakfast and then we all did yard work! I know AWESOME!
Mitchell always does all the mowing and trimming and i do the flower beds and weeding and spraying. I finished before he did so while he played with the weed whacker I took pictures. and yes i really do dress like that on normal days so the long skirt has seen more then its fair share of yard work.
I actually enjoy doing housework in long skirts it is SO comfortable and when i am outside doing yard work too i feel so pioneer-like. Modernly old fashioned i guess.
So after our long morning we packed up a picnic lunch and drove tot eh splash park in meridian. I kids loved it, Eli had the most fun getting wet though!
That night we rented the Lego movie and M man made some amazing spaghetti. Thanks honey!
the end credits of movies always have music and our tradition- rule- is that we all have a dance party to the music at the end. Kids love it, i tried to get some awesome motion pictures of it for you to see but we where all so fast that its just faded blurs
I did not get pictures of the kids at the splash park in the water :(  but i got some on M man's phone of them on the playground toys by the picnic tables.
the picture of me with all the flowers is to show off how many there are. M man got me the flowers seeds as a graduation from college gift and just look how they grew. You are the best hubby ever!

the last of the raspberries where eaten!

my thoughtful boy

my basketball star

my flowers

the blurry dance party pictures in which we were to fast to be caught of camera

park