Birthday Party

Yesterday was my 31st birthday. Brett and the kids made me giant cookies decorated with copious amounts of frosting. Jack sang me "Happy Birthday" which I will try to post soon. I think the kids ate more frosting than they got on the cookies.

Uncle Dale's Wedding

Brett's brother, and lifetime bachelor, Dale, tied the knot with his new wife Angie on Saturday. They had a beautiful wedding at a little white country church. It was very simple and sweet. Everyone had a good time, at the wedding and the BBQ afterwards.

Catching Butterflies

On Wednesday before we left for St. George, AJ finally caught a butterfly. We have a very large "butterfly bush" in the front yard and she has spent quite a lot of time trying . I thought these pics were very reminiscent of summer. Kids catching butterflies.

AJ put a slice of apple in the jar for the butterfly to eat and (somewhat surprisingly) is survived the night and she let it go the next day. It flew off quite unperturbed. But there is more to the story; later that day AJ went out to catch butterflies again, and she caught one. While we were transferring it to the jar I noticed a unique tear in the butterfly's wing and it turned out she had re-caught the same butterfly!

Big News

The big news this month is that AJ had her ears pierced. We went to the mall to chose a bracelet and necklace for her to wear to Uncle Dale's wedding. As we were shopping around she said, "I want ear rings instead of a necklace." I have always told her she could get them whenever she wanted but explained they would stick a needle in her ear. So I reminded her of this fact, the needle in her ear, but she said she would be brave, and boy was she! She didn't even flinch. We could tell she was nervous, but she didn't show it one bit. She is very proud of the earrings and, as you can tell, thinks she looks beautiful. (I agree.)

Tadpoles!

Last summer we caught a few polywogs in a pond at a local park and brought them home to the fountain in our front yard. Despite very harsh conditions (I am always draining and cleaning the "pond" as we call it) at least 3 polywogs survived to adulthood because we have 3 very loud frogs in our yard where there once were none. That was last summer. This summer our loud frogs have become involved in a summer romance because our pond is full (I mean 100s) of polywogs. The day we discovered this was a very happy one for us. We now take very good care of the pond and hope to be overrun with frogs by summer end.