She's mobile

It has finally happened, Lily is mobile. For a couple of weeks she has been accidentally scooting and rolling all over the floor and about two weeks ago she finally did it...she started crawling. There is now nothing stopping her, she is everywhere and she's getting there quickly. I can't believe that she my baby is growing up this fast.

Kayla can hear again

Many of you probably don't know but Kayla gave us a little bit of stress over the past several months. During the last school year it was brought to our attention from her teacher that she was having difficulty hearing, we had noticed it at home as well, but we thought she was just ignoring us and causing us grief. We got her hearing tested and she failed four different tests and we found out that she had significant hearing loss in both ears because of an inner ear infection. The good news was that they said it was correctable with tubes. We scheduled her surgery for this summer and got it done at the end of July. She had tubes in both ears and her adenoids removed. It was pretty hard on us to take her in to have surgery at such a young age, but she was a super champ and went through all the motions like it was nothing. We were so proud of how she did and we had the follow up doctor's appointment and her hearing was perfect. Here is her picture in her hospital gown right before they took her off to the operating room...she's awful cute.

Garage Sale cleanup

This summer Jenni and I held a much needed garage sale and cleaned out a lot of the extra stuff that had been cluttering up our home for years. We had a very successful sale and netted enough to by ourselves a much needed new recliner. Anyway, as we were cleaning up the kids found my old ironing board and decided to play surfing with it. It was pretty funny to watch them cart it around under arm and pretend like they were hitting the waves.

Our Big Boy's Birthday party

This was the year that our baby boy turned the big 5, so it was his year to have a big birthday party with all his friends. It is a little stressful on us as parents to figure out what kind of party to throw. Jon has a summer birthday, meaning getting all of his daycare friends' address's for invitations and finding something that they can all do. Then we received our Friends of the Zoo pamphlet and it showed that the KC Zoo will throw your party for you. Jenni called them up and set up our date, we invited all his friends, and we had a great time. It definitely was the way to throw a kid's birthday party. The zoo provided a place to party, the cake, ice cream, drinks, gifts, and of course animals for the kids to touch and learn about. Jon really liked his party and it seemed that his friends had a lot of fun as well. It's just hard to believe that Jon is 5 years old, he's getting so big.

Independence Day

Since Jenni and I bought our house we have kind of taken over the duties of hosting the family Fourth of July party, and this year was no different. We were blessed with another wonderful weather day for the fourth and we took advantage of it. We grilled some chicken, blew up some of our own fireworks and watched the city celebration from our back deck.

Memphis Vacation part 2

Well, in the last post I discussed the first leg of our Memphis vacation and now we'll move onto the part that actually talks about our trip to Memphis. We rolled into Memphis in the late evening hours and went straight to my aunt and uncle's house to have dinner. Rob cooked up some pretty good BBQ and we visited for awhile before we went hunting for the hotel. We got there alright and settled in for the evening.

The next morning we made the decision to go to the Memphis Zoo, and we are really glad we did. The day looked like it would rain all day long and it would make the trip miserable, but it turned out that the clouds moved in and the rain stayed across the river in Arkansas and we had a perfect 80 degree day to visit the zoo. The animals were all out and playing and the people all stayed home leaving just my family and a few others to enjoy the zoo.

Overall, the Memphis Zoo is one of the best zoo's we've ever been to. We started in the cat house where all the cats were out playing and showing off for us, the cougar actually gave us some cat calls. We moved onto the reptile house where we saw some snake feedings, and the panda's were cool but kind of uneventful. Our favorite exhibit was the polar bear's, they were so playful and gave us many photo ops. The bears would dive down in the water and then push off the glass of the the observation room and swim by all the people. They were really fun.

After the zoo trip we went over to my Aunt Janice's house and celebrated her college graduation and mingled with all of my family that made the trip to Memphis. We left on Sunday and headed to Centrallia, Illinois to visit my cousin Steph. We hadn't seen her or her kids in years. They are all so big and seem to be really great kids. It was a fantastic family vacation.