One of the fun things I let the little boys do, is take a bath and stay in for as LONG as they want. This is an easy way to get the gunk out of their fingernails and toenails that they come with from the other place. It's usually so ground into their nails that to get it out by conventional methods is painful for them. SO, just add water and soak for, oh, an hour, and it comes out all by itself. After their bath today, I spiked up their hair. Clayton's hair is longer than Tommy's so it spiked up really nice. Seriously, these boys could be Billy Idol's love children. :-) Here they are:

We were going to go camping last weekend with Mom and Dad's ward.... but Clayton started the day with a fever, so we didn't want to be out in the middle of nowhere and have him be sick. SO, since I had already made all the foil dinners and all that, we decided to make a firepit in our back yard. We invited Nathan, Owen, and Ella over since Tiff and Bree were in Idaho. We roasted hot dogs, cooked our foil dinners, and then later roasted marshmallows. Here are photos: The fire is going....Ira helped make the foil dinners and also helped dig the pit, and set the fire. He signed off a bunch of stuff for his Bear badge that night.

After dinner we roasted marshmallows. I think the kids ate their month's allowance of sugar that night.

The kids did a really great job around the fire, everyone stayed where they needed to and fun was had by all. We all smelled like fire and still got to sleep in normal beds--- we found out later we had a better time in our backyard than the Foothills Ward (and Mom and Dad WIlliams, and Michelle and Johnathan ) did. :-)

We had a birthday party today for Joy (7) and Clayton (3). I (crazy lady that I am) decided to bake sugar cookies in the shapes of hearts, flowers, dinosaurs, and trucks (and 5 stars), and let the kids decorate the cookies. They ran around in our yard and then went to work on the cookies. Aside from our families we had a family from the ward who has kids the same age as ours, the Masons. I'm really happy that they came. Joy LOVES Mikayla and I really like Amanda and Jared Mason. We came into the ward and now I'm Amanda's visiting teacher, and Aaron is their home teacher. I wonder if Heavenly Father is trying to tell us something?
I was also really happy to have Ray and Amanda and Jordan join us as well as Nathan and Tiffany and the kids, and all the grandparents, and Rach and Jessica of course (the kids would have never forgiven me had Jessica not been there LOL) I'm posting some pictures. I still haven't figured out how to make pictures and text go where I want them to go......

Here I lay..... Aaron and I are both trying to go to sleep. Poor guy, he wasn't feeling well on Sunday night, so I drugged him with Advil PM. SO, he slept too long Monday morning, which helped him get over the flu bug he was coming down with, but also is causing him to not be able to sleep tonight (Monday night). So I came home from work at 130 am, and he's still tossing and turning. I have a lot of ideas for our new family blog, and Aaron has a lot of ideas for the new family back yard, so we're both being kept awake by our muses.

Lets see, posting some pictures.... we have Ira posing with the bookends he made at Cub Scout Day Camp in our stake, wearing Dad's hat, and for some reason known only to 9 year olds, holding a dime in his mouth. Then here's Tommy just being cute. The kids love for us to take their pictures. Heck if I had those eyes I'd be a camera ho too. :-)

We had Nathan and Tiffany and kids over the other night, as well as Mom and Dad. The boys were putting up the cabinets from Grandma and Grandpa's old house, into our office area. Tiffany and I were out with our respective tribes, and Grandma and Ira were inside watching a movie. It was fun having everyone over. I just wish there were some grass or something. The kids were all covered in dust from our plain ol' dirt yard.

Here's Joy posing, even though I asked her not to. She can't help it. To the right is Tiffany helping Owen do the monkey bars. Really she's just making sure he doesn't fall. He's doing most of the monkeying all by himself.

The rest are just shots of the kids playing. I thought I got more of the cousins, but apparently I'm one of "those" moms whose camera is attracted to their own kids. THe bottom picture, even though it just has Joy in it, is JOY doing the neat "trick" Ella showed her, of climbing up the rope ladder and then hurling your body to the slide from the opposite side of the ladder. Thankfully, no broken bones resulted from this play date :-)