The more the merrier!

Ah, summertime!  We have been doing our best to enjoy it most thoroughly!  We kicked off the month of July with this little guy's 1st birthday:

He loved his cake!  We didn't do too much on his actual birthday.  It was a Sunday and both Mommy and Daddy had lessons to teach.  We did the usual visiting at grandparents and then came home and let him have at the cake.  Such a cute little mess.  He is definitely loving real people food more than big brother did at this point!  I do not have his exact measurements (again), but he is now in the 1.3 percentile for height.  So technically he is growing!  He is such a happy baby.  He has learned how to climb up the stairs.  Now we just need to teach him to go down the stairs and I can get rid of the darn gate! 

The day after his birthday, we went up the canyon with my family.  This was even more fun because my sister Summer was in town!  The kids played pretty well together and got perfectly dirty.  Successful outing in the mountains!  We had some dutch oven, roasted gigantic marshmallows, and then brought the kids home to make sure their beds smelled as much like campfire as they did!

This is what happens when I say "Look at me!  Look at the camera!"

The triplets

My Mummer!  (Oh, and my dad without his 'stache)

Cute kiddos!

This little boy LOVED playing in the dirt.  Goodness but he got dirty!

My two favorite guys

Grandma and Cedie

We spent the next day cleaning the house and getting ready for the 4th of July.  My sister Shaye and her family got here around 6am that morning.  We enjoyed having breakfast with our ward at the park.  The bonus being that I didn't have to cook pancakes myself!  Haha!  After that we got tickets for the family to go and see Brave.  A big thank you to my family for sitting on the 2nd row, which is all that was left for that many people at a regular showing.  We got a babysitter for the boys, and remembered to bring earplugs for our sound-sensitive little sister.  She thoroughly enjoyed it, but I was glad we didn't go to the 3D one.  She did get pretty scared by the scary bears and I think it would have been worse if they'd been jumping out at her, too!  She buried her little face in my chest until the scary parts were over.  At the end, she decided she was "brave" enough (haha!) to watch the last scary bear part.  That's pretty big for her!  After the movie we came home and got our bbq on!  Between husband's family, my family, and Brodie's brother and his family, we ended up with about 40 people here for little brother's birthday party/ the 4th of July.  It was AWESOME!  A good time was had by all!  Husband did catch a fireball in the face from grilling the hamburgers.  It singed his hair a bit, as well as his eyelashes.  Fortunately he wasn't really hurt.  And he has really long eyelashes so nobody can really tell some of them got singed!  Another bonus of having us all there is that we finally updated the family photo:

I love little sister's face.  Hilarious!  A big thank you to Lindy and Jeremy for taking the pictures for us!  We let little brother open all his presents, which he seemed to enjoy doing.  His siblings were also more than willing to help him with this part! 

After presents we broke out the homemade ice cream and the Costco cake.  Little brother was once again in heaven with his own piece of birthday cake!

We went out front to set off fireworks and were treated to a show by our new across-the-street neighbor.  He had bought some serious aerial fireworks, and ours did pale a bit by comparison.  But hey, we enjoyed the show and didn't have to pay the $$$$$$ for the aerial ones!  The kids did snaps and sparklers and watched husband set off our fireworks.  Then we all went to bed completely exhausted and happy!  It took me a couple days to recover from it all, but it was wonderful to have my whole family around!  We know how to party for sure!