My amazing, beautiful, wonderful,... and only sister just got married!

 This is all of my immediate family. So nice to have all of us together! 5 brothers, my parents, my sister, and me! :)

 This lovely occasion was on Calvin's birthday!! He loved having all of his cousins to celebrate his big day.

 The birthday boy with the beautiful bride!

 Just a couple pictures around temple square one of my favorite places to go visit!

Grateful Michael could be there as well. Everything couldn't have been more perfect!

pillow

This pillow has been my most recent project. I made it with the Young women in my ward and made it so this bed spread would have a pillow to go with it.  It was fun and easy, I think I just might make more in the future!

preschool

 I keep forgetting to take pictures of Calvin's preschool class and to get pictures of the things he is doing. When I'm teaching I'm constantly thinking about what we're doing, what we're doing next and how well the class is internalizing everything. Picture taking is usually the last thing on my mind.. but I finally remembered today and maybe now can remember more in the future.

Anyways Calvin started preschool on August 4th. I am his teacher and we have three other friends who come and join us. So far we are both loving it! He loves that he has friends who come to play and he has been learning lots.

Above is a picture of the ocean he made last week while learning about the letter o. (Alden is holding it up because Calvin was too tired. Calvin will still take a nap about once a week and I think this was taken on a nap day.)
The picture below was today while they were working with linking cubes. Calvin loves that he goes to school just like his big brother and seems to really look forward to preschool every day!

monsoons

 The monsoons are here and we love them. So fun to play in the rain!  The picture above and the one below wasn't rain, it was Alden and Calvin playing with the water. They were so excited because they had made their own swimming pool.  They even explained all the nice features it had...diving board, hot and cold pools, deeper end..ext.
After they had played for a while I suggested we go to the big swimming pool. Alden looked at me bewildered, "why would we do that mom, we have our very own swimming pool here!" He then went on trying to convince me to go swimming with them.

 I think the whole swimming pool thing made Alden excited about building things. The other day he came to me and said how he was going to build a temple. (He explained how they are nice and that way we wouldn't have to drive to mesa each month we could just go in our back yard.)
He then explained part of his plan. He said how he needed lots of people to help, so he was going to make a sign that he was going to have me hold out by the street and then him and Calvin would be working in the back yard.
His first sign read, "get ants". I guess that was the first step before he could build his temple, he needed to rid the yard of all the ants.
I Suggested that we hang the sign up. He loved that idea," yes" as he excitedly jumps up and down,"then you can help too!"
With great excitement he hung up his sign, he then ran in saying, "mom, the door bell is going to start ringing and lots of people will start coming!!"
After a few hours Alden started to get disappointed that no one had come. I explained that it could be his sign.. Not everyone comes running to get ants.
He then made his next sign, "Treats, come help". Surely everyone would come running if treats were involved and this time he let them know he wanted them to come. Also he wrote it in larger print and put it on bright paper.
Well as you can imagine people did not come running as Alden had anticipated. He now has moved on to his next great idea.

His project did make me think that we would have quite the world if all you needed to do when you needed help was to put up a sign and have everyone come running.

1st day of kindergarten!

Alden was super excited to start Kindergarten.  He was a little confused because we had told him that he wouldn't start school until he was 5 but his birthday isn't until the end of the month. He wondered if he was just going to play somewhere at the school until he turned 5 but we explained that he is just lucky and gets to start when he is 4.

He has had a great first couple of days.  I asked him if he wants to do homeschool in the future and he always says no that he wants to go to the big school.  Maybe that will change one day though.  I've thought that I would do homeschool at some point and have planned and prepared for it.  I have all of the workbooks for him for this year but this school had everything that I wanted in a school so this is what we will do for this year!

He goes to school from 8-11.  So he is home in time for lunch.  It seems to be just right.  Alden misses Calvin and Calvin misses Alden when they are separated, so when he comes home they are both excited to play with each other.

Last day home before school starts

In the afternoon I came into the kitchen to tell Alden he had just a couple hours before bed and the next day he would start school. I asked him what he wanted to do in his last couple of hours.   He was in the kitchen doing the dishes and said he wanted to finish them.
I then had the boys each paint a painting on some canvases.  I've been wanting to do this for sometime but had never made it to the store to buy the canvases.  On this day I finally had made it to the store where I thought the canvases were on sale.  I went to check out and it turned out they had sent out their add a week early and they weren't on sale until next week.  They would be $8 more then I thought so we put them back and started to leave feeling very disappointed when we saw our neighbor come in, who said she happened to have 3 canvases in her closet that she was planning to get rid of!  She brought them over that day and we were still able to make our paintings that we had wanted! It is amazing to see all of the everyday little miracles. I know we are loved.