July in-betweens

Playing catch up, once again. I'll never learn my lesson.

We headed to Lake MacBride on a hot Saturday in July. We had a great afternoon there!

 We met our friends, the Pitchforths, there. But we were late, as usual, so our time only ended up overlapping a bit.

 Emry may or may not have eaten a fair share of sand.

 Her reaction when I'd stop her from eating it.

 Declan thought it was the best day ever because we brought a whole bag of chips and pretty much just let him go to town.

I finally picked my cross stitching up again. I have had several projects in the work for way too long now. I'm finally starting to get a few done. This one was for our friends from Singapore.

 We spent the month of July trying to get this look of Emry's on camera. She tilts her head down and then looks up at you with her eyes and makes a funny/serious face. This is the best we got! We are no good.

 "Can I hold Emry?" That question always makes me laugh now as she seems to be just about the same size as them haha.

 We had a bunch of stuff going on the first Saturday of the month so we were going to miss the Home Depot kids project. We thought we were really geniuses when we stopped by to see if they would give us the kits to do at home and they said yes! Jump ahead a few days to when I finally busted them out to do with the kids only to discover they hadn't given us the screens to go around our bug houses. Oh well, they still had fun painting the wood haha.

 Our one and only trip to the pool this summer. Little did I know this would pretty much be our last really hot week of the summer. I'm kind of a wuss about going to the pool unless it's really hot. Brennan worked from home for the afternoon while Emry napped so I could take the other two to the pool without the added stress of Emry. It was a fantastic afternoon. We were there for over 4 hours! And they could have stayed longer.

 Declan was a little wiped out.

 Tatum took this next picture of Emry. As well as approximately 573 others but this one was pretty good!

 A trip to the library where I suddenly realize I have three kids that play on outings like this. My baby isn't such a baby anymore!

 Checking herself out in the mirror.

 We got some building/crafting kits as prizes for the summer reading program. We had fun building things with marshmallows and toothpicks. They especially enjoyed eating the marshmallows when we were done.

 Loving the swing.

On to August!

st. louis zoo

After we finished at the City Museum in St. Louis, the boys and their families had to hit the road. They had a long drive ahead of them. The rest of got hotel rooms in St. Louis. That turned out to be quite an ordeal but it all worked out in the end. Friday morning we took it easy and had a swim at the hotel pool. We played a pretty serious game of keep away. 

Our hotel just so happened to be right across from Tucano's, which is Ben's favorite restaurant, so we all went there for lunch.

I, for one, ate a whole lot of delicious meat. Too much, in fact. After lunch it was time for our last set of goodbyes.

These two are quite the little pals and got along so well this time around. There's just something so special about cousins

We had a heck of a time deciding what to do after lunch. We were quite tired and just heading home sounded pretty nice. But we were also considering going to the St. Louis zoo since we were there (and it's free!) but it wasn't terribly close and it was in the opposite direction of home. After much debating we finally decided to go and we were so glad we did!

It was a beautiful day and the zoo was really nice and the kids were great!

Up close and personal with the gorilla.

This indoor penguin exhibit was a lot of fun. The penguins were fun to watch and it gave us a great chance to cool off a bit.

We brought our double stroller to the reunion so Mara could use it for Lincoln at the museum. We were so glad to have it at the zoo. Declan fell asleep on the way there so we just transferred him to the stroller and it worked great as a way for each of the older kids to have breaks. And Emry was a trooper hanging out in the stroller pretty much the whole time.

After a few hours at the zoo we headed home. The kids slept the entire 4 hour drive home and it was great!