Blur

It's that time of year again - SUMMER! O-kay, I know it's not officially summer on the calendar yet but it's definitely summer time on the youth ministry calendar! With Chris being a youth minister I always feel like our summers are a complete blur as we pack for one trip, come home, unpack, wash clothes, pack, go on another trip, come home, etc, etc.... All the time I'm working as much as possible during the weeks when we are home in order to be able to afford to take the time off to go on the trips. We haven't been on any trips yet but our lives have felt like a blur all the same ever since school got out. We've been to several graduation parties and hosted an area wide youth event at our church. To top all of that off, my parents were here for the past week and we had several family things. During that same time, our adopted little sister, Anna was visiting too. She's not so little anymore. She's 16 now. We sure had a great time with her. She keeps us laughing. For some strange reason, I don't have any pictures of Anna. That makes me very sad. I think I was too busy to take pictures. Most of the pictures in this post are from my mom's camera.

The first night my parents were in town, we had a cookout at our house with us, Anna, my parents, and my brother's family. The kids had a blast playing in the yard. I love this picture of my nephew with our Murphy. So sweet.Jack and his cousins made sure to pick some weeds (oops, I mean flowers) for us!
On Saturday we attended Sawyer's 2nd birthday party!!! Jack was very excited on our way to Sawyer's house for his party but I kept thinking that Jack wasn't acting all the way right. Well, we arrived at the party and he immediately became a "loner." Here are the other kids having a blast and my little Jack is in the background (look closely for his little head) playing with all of Sawyer's toys. Right when it was time for Sawyer to open presents, Jack had a HUGE meltdown. And, I mean it was HUGE. He would NOT stop crying no matter what we did. I even promised him cake and ice cream and he completely refused. It was so sad. We made the tough decision to leave the party early and Jack cried almost the whole way home. He finally fell asleep and when he woke up from his nap he had a fever. No other signs of sickness except just not feeling well. So, we bummed around the rest of the night and Sunday morning I kept him home from church. By Sunday evening he was feeling quite a bit better. He was especially excited when Chris brought home a new Thomas flashlight that a friend of ours from church found for Jack at a yard sale on Saturday.
Oh, and one more note about the above picture....Jack requests to wear his "crocs" all the time. They are just fake crocs that we got for him to wear to the pool and stuff and really they are too big but he gets pretty insistent and then will not take them off.

Tuesday night my dad took us all to eat and here is our best picture of the grandparents with all 3 kids.
After dinner, my dad, brother, and Chris went to have a guys night while mom, Kym, and I took the kids to our neighborhood playground.Then, last but not least........last night was when Chris and I got to go see Wicked in downtown Indy. The show was INCREDIBLE. I loved it so much and this was probably one of the best birthday presents ever!!! We spent the night downtown at the Sheraton. We had a corner room over looking monument circle. We could see the theatre out one window and Monument Circle out the other. The Murat is the funky looking tower in the middle of this picture. That's where we saw Wicked after eating a delicious dinner at The Rathskellar.

Here's Chris being silly before we left for the show pretending to smoke a pipe in his easy chair.And, here we are! Happy for a short get away that was well worth every penny right at the start of our big blur, called SUMMER!!!