Breakfast

Weekday mornings are a bit hectic in our household. Getting two kids ready and off to the babysitters by a certain time every morning so we can get to work on time....yeah, a bit hectic. If we are running behind on time, Jen normally packs the kids breakfast to go and they eat it in the car on they way to daycare. We have been learning what doesn't work well for kids to eat in the car. Today it was powdered donuts....


...thankfully baby wipes cleaned most of it up!

Snuggle Bug

For the past week Zach has been walking into our bedroom about 4-5am. He brings some books with him and asks us to read him a book. Of course we say "NO - we are sleeping". So he curls up on our bedroom floor with a blanket and falls asleep. This morning Zach walked in to our room, said nothing, and just curled up with his blanket on the floor....



...we have to remember not to step on him when we get up for work! I sure hope this phase is short lived.....

End of Summer = Start of Preschool (again)

Today Zach started his second year of preschool. We decided to have him return to the same place he attended last year. This year he goes two days a week instead of one day a week. He as excited to meet his teacher, Mrs. Madsen, and see the "jungle" room he would be in this year. Zach always talks about his preschool friends from last year....so now he is going to meet more friends!

Here is the big boy ready to roll to his first day of preschool this year!

Logan came along for the ride. Daddy always provides treats to the boys on car rides, this morning it was GUMMY WORMS. Yup....Logan enjoyed every single gummy worm he was given. Doesn't he look happy?

Lagoon

We survived our first family trip to Lagoon! Lagoon is an amusement park (think 6 flags style, just on a smaller scale with a LOT more shade) in Farmington Utah - about 40 minutes north of our house. Our neighbor was able to score a bunch of half off tickets, so we decided to take they day of work and hang out with them at Lagoon.

We arrived about noon (the park opens at 11am) and found a pavilion to eat our lunch under. Lagoon lets you bring in what ever food you want. Here are the kids chowing down.

We had two 3.5 year olds, a 2 year old and a 1.5 year old. Our neighbor Natalie had two of the leash children backpacks. She put one on her 2 year old daughter and Logan decided he wanted to wear the other one. He thought he looked SUPER COOL with a monkey on his back...UNTIL he realized other people could pull him around. Here is Haley taking care of Logan.

The monkey backpacks only lasted until we walked to our first ride, then they came off. We hit up kiddie land first. There were tons of rides for the kids. They loved all of them....the adults loved all of them too! Here they are riding the airplanes/helicopters...

Here I think Zach realized just how HOT it was outside...with no breeze what so ever.

Daddy and Logan flying the skies...

Three kids looking for trouble...

We survived until about 5:30pm. Both kids refused naps (obviously). We pumped them up with some sugar...but the melt downs still happened. Here is Zach - he walked 20 feet away from us and threw himself on the ground.

So at 6pm we decided to hit the road back home. On the way out we decided to let the kids run wild in the splash pads the had at the entrance. Logan wasn't too much into it (really tired boy at this point)...but Zach went to town! Good thing Jen packed an extra change of clothes...the boy was drenched!

We never even made it into the adult roller coaster part of the park. That didn't bother us as the kids were having a blast and it was awesome to see them so happy and get excited over rides. I bet our next trip to Disney will be the highlight of our kids year!

IM Flash Open House 2011

It is summer time, which means it is time for our work to host another Friends and Family Open House! This year they combined what had been most popular from previous years for one great big event.....outdoor catered lunch from Goodwood BBQ, outdoor games, sno cones, cotton candy AND some booths indoors - Bunny Suit pictures, AMHS race cars, YE lab show and tell....and liquid nitrogen ice cream (Jen's group hosted that one!). We can't explain how much our kids enjoy coming to this event every year. Every time we drive by our work Zach says, "that is mommy and daddy's work!" He even tells us he wants to go to work with us some days so he can play in the bouncy houses...yes, Zach thinks we play on bouncy houses all day at work :P

Here are Jason and Rick from Jen's group mixing up some liquid nitrogen ice cream!

Zach and Logan checking out the race track...

Zach in his bunny suit picture.

Logan in his with dad! Check out the grin on his face...

We invited the Abel's to come to this event with us this year. The kids loved the YE group demo - they were freezing all sorts of things with liquid nitrogen and were able to look at small objects through a powerful microscope and see semiconductor wafers.

Of course Logan was a COOL dude most of the day.

Outdoor activities when it is 90+ degrees outside aren't always popular with us. Zach and Logan were drawn to the 'kiddie' pool where they could fish out their very own rubber ducky to keep...

All in all a great day. The kids get excited to see where we work and this year we were able to bring the Abel's along with us...maybe now they will understand why we are such NERDS!

Hogle Zoo

It had been a while since we had been to the Zoo - so we decided to make that today's adventure! Zach remembers the "train ride" at Hogle Zoo....all four of us were able to ride it this time. Logan's first train ride at the zoo...he was a pro! No pictures from that ride, mom spent the ride keeping Logan sitting on his chair.

We also brought a picnic lunch for us to eat. The kids started to enjoy that until they realized all the distractions that were around them. There were some birds making some noise right behind us. So the boys climbed the brick retaining wall to get a closer look. They were being nice to each other so I took a picture...

Some of the highlights from the trip were the elephants. Zach loved how this one made noise (not a real elephant)...

Logan couldn't take his eyes off the real elephants. He stood there and watched them for a good 10 minutes before we convinced him to keep looking around for other animals...

I think the next big highlight for the kids were the giraffes.

At this point it was just too HOT to stay outside. We made the loop back towards the carousel for a ride, then got some ice cream to help cool us down. Zach rode the tiger, Logan rode the panda.

You know it was a good day when on the drive home you look back and see this....

Doggy wanna swim?

Dustin walked into our master bathroom this morning to see this....


That would be two dog stuff animals in our bathtub...with the water turned on very slowly...with about an inch deep of water in the tub at this point. I guess Logan thought the dogs needed a bath!

Slip 'N' Slide

On this hot August night we decided to get out the slip 'N' slide and let the kids have some fun. Zach was all over it - he remembered using the slip 'N' slide last summer.

Logan on the other hand wasn't into it as much. We had to force him slide down it....

That only worked a few times then he gave us the 'face'.....NO MORE MOM....NO MORE!


Zach on the other hand got really into it. He was doing all sorts of tricks down the slip 'N' slide!

Only one more month of summer left!

Jordanelle Reservoir

We decided to take the day off and spend some time in the sun!

We headed out near Park City to the Jordanelle Reservoir for the afternoon - we rented a pontoon boat with the Krotosky's. We left Logan and Sophia in day care (Logan has NO FEAR when it comes to water....that's all we needed, a 19 month old jumping in the water every chance he had!) and brought Zach along with us. Zach was so thrilled to go in a boat, it was all he talked about the day before - check out his smile!

The water was a bit chilly, but once you were fully emerged it was fine. It actually was very refreshing to be in the water with the warm afternoon. We rented a tube with the boat and we all took turns on the water. Jeff started it off for us....we tried as hard as we could but were unsuccessful in flipping him off the tube!

Next up was Dustin....we also had a hard time getting him to flip off the tube!

Jen had a blast on the tube....she squealed like a little girl....

Next up was Zach and Dustin! Zach actually did pretty good until he realized the water was a bit chilly...and then he didn't want to have anything to do with the water.

So Zach became the captain of boat and was driving us around in the tube instead of riding in the tube. Here Zach is driving Dustin around on the tube.

After a few hours of tubing we decided to do some chilling. We parked the boat

Awesome afternoon! We might have to make this a yearly thing....next year Logan and Sophia might be old enough to join us.