Mommy's 28th Birthday!!!

I can hardly believe I am turning 28!! It just sounds so old and I still feel young sometimes. Time just doesn't stop I guess. I had a wonderful birthday. I had a date with Nate. We went to a real Amish restaurant that was located in an actual Amish home. They transformed half of their home into a restaurant with a buffet style dinner cuisine. It was real Amish style, with super friendly service, and delicious home grown food! It was the best real Amish dinner experience I think we've ever had. Very fun! On Sunday we had a family dinner at Grandma & Grandpa Routsong's house in Kendallville. Nate has an elderly Simplx customer that is a retired professional cake maker and decorator. So he asked her to make me a birthday cake. Her elderly fashions paid off well as she decorated the cake with flowers and ribbons of frosting, very feminine :-).

Since I am getting ready to run my half marathon race in just a couple of weeks, he asked her to make it a "running theme." So being a cute elderly little lady, she picked out a couple of running cartoons, colored them in herself with colored pencils, and asked Nate which one he preferred. He chose "figure B." And she stuck figure B on a stick at the corner of the cake so that it could have a "running theme" to blend with her floral technique! I found it quite cute and humorous and I loved it! It was a beautiful and delicious cake!!

Here is Kaylee and Grandma at our family birthday party. Kaylee is definitely warming up to people better these days. For a short while she was having some stranger anxiety, but lately, she seems happy with whomever!!

Here is an excited boy!

And 2 excited girls!

And 3 of us making a wish and trying hard not to get spit on the cake!!

Mom & Me

Me and my little Angel, look at those bright blue eyes!! She is just the sweetest little bundle of joy that there ever was! She is so easy going, happyall the time, just excited for life. She adores her brothers and loves to "chase" them around the house (with a little help from mom). Now that the boys are in preschool I have 2 mornings a week just with me and Kaylee. I often plan things to do during those mornings like grocery shop or clean the house or get some office work done, but sometimes I find that all I want to do is hang out with my girl! We play on the floor together, read stories (or eat books), share snacks, and I get to rock her to sleep for her nap, which I don't often get to do! What precious moments those are for me when I am normally so busy with those busy boys! I love to spend time with my baby girl. She just makes me smile every time I seethose beautiful blue eyes and long eyelashes looking at me. It is an honor to be a mother, to be needed and loved and wanted by such wonderful children. It just makes life worth living more than anything ever before. The boys are so busy, but they are wonderful, and Kaylee is just a sweet joy every waking minute. I feel so blessed to be able to share my life and my love with these three beautiful children of God.

Lego Creations

Jaxton loves to create things. He always has! Today he made a few different things with his tiny legos that he loves to build with. Because he knows they often get bumped or fall or get broken, he wanted to make sure these creations got caught on camera so they would "never be lost." So here they are, Jaxton's greatest creations of the day.

First he made a spaceship. He is very symmetrical when it comes to building things, as you can tell by his creation. He is symmetrical with the shape and size of lego, as well as the color!! He is very, very particular when it comes to building things. I just love his imagination!

Next he built a tractor, similar to the one in CARS the movie, with giant back wheels and small front wheels. It was complete with a seat and a steering wheel. He was very proud of both his creations :-)

McDonald's

Our cousin Katie was in town visiting Grandma & Grandpa Routsong. So they stopped by to visit us in Fort Wayne and we went to Burger King for lunch. It was a very fun afternoon. The boys love the tunnels and playlands at fast food joints. For some reason, those tunnels always bring out the best in them two. They just become best buddies inside those tunnels, and it was no different today. What cuties!! It was a lot of fun to see Katie and to hang out with her for the afternoon. The boys loved her company hiding around inside the tunnels with her, and Kaylee felt just as comfortable on her lap as she does on mine!

Oh No I'm Trapped!!

Cousin Katie with Kaylee

Cutie Cooper doing some acrobatics

What a happy boy! Jaxton Boy!

Cooper with Cousin Katie

Katie with Jaxton, Cooper & Kaylee and the fish!

Grandma Routsong with Queen Kaylee

Labor Day Camping Trip

We went camping for Labor Day Weekend at Chain of Lakes State Park, about 1 hour away. We stayed Friday night and had a blast! Unfortunately we chose the 2 hottest days of the whole summer to go. It was between 95 and 98 degrees all weekend! It was sooo hot and humid and sticky that we ended up just staying 1 night instead of 2. Regardless, we had a blast. Upon arriving, we set up our tent and were soo hot we decided to check out the beach before settling down. The beach closed at sunset, so we only had a few minutes to swim on Friday night, but we had a blast!!

Beautiful sunset & Beautiful girl!

Jaxton getting ready to swim

Nate & Cooper

We went camping with several families from our ward. Here is Jaxton with one of his good friends, Gavin.

The Newhard family also came camping with us. Joey is Cooper's age and Jasline is 1 month younger than Kaylee. They are great friends.

We didn't make the boys get in their seatbelts to drive from the beach back to our campsite, just a 3 minute drive around the camp. They thought that was soo cool! They were so excited to NOT have to wear seatbelts for once!

You can't go camping without smores! Here is Cooper roasting marshmellows. He had been asking and asking and asking when it would be time to make marshmellows and chocolate. He is definitely our sugar man!

Look at him enjoy that smore!! These are unique smores because we used the Keebler cookies that have chocolate on one side and cookie on the other. So we put our roasted marshmellow between the chocolate side of 2 cookies and squished it together. It was a little less messy than traditional smores and the kids loved them! And so did I! Yum!

Jaxton, eating his smore!

Here we are in the tent, getting ready to settle down for the night. It was still like 80 or 90 degrees when we were ready for bed, so just a little bit miserable. I assumed it would get cold at night so all I packed were warm footsie jammies for wintertime. Needless to say we couldn't dress them in those. So they slept in an extra pair of clothes. The boys had a very hard time relaxing and falling asleep. They were just wired with excitement to be sleeping in a tent, after just eating several sugar filled smores!! So bedtime was tricky. But after we all got cozy together watching the movie Incredibles, we all fell asleep about 12:30 in the morning!

Cooper climbed into bed with Nate in the middle of the night and got cozy with us. He is one boy that loves to cuddle. Jaxton woke up super early, as soon as it was beginning to get light out. He was up and ready to go out and play! I have no idea what time it was, but he definitely got very little sleep! Ohhh the excitement of camping!!

Kaylee Girl had a great time! Of course I had no idea how she would do being out of her element, but nothing seemed to phase her at all. She slept in her t-shirt and diaper since it was scorching hot, and I tried getting her to sleep by rocking her, nursing her in the dark outside. But she just squirrmed and squirrmed. At home I just lay her down, so thats what I tried next. And believe it or not, she put herself to sleep. She somehow felt right at home. She woke up one time (just like she does at home) and slept in till probably 8:00am! I was amazed! She got pretty sweaty, but she never complained. She is such a happy go-lucky girl and just goes with the flow! What an angel!

The families we went camping with were the Newhards, the Alberts, the Maguires, the Daytons, and the Grahams. Here are some of the kids eating a delicious blueberry pancake breakfast together: Jaxton, Gavin, Haley, and Cooper.

After breakfast we brushed teeth outside and tried to clean up a bit. The boys thought that was pretty funny to brush teeth outside. They couldn't believe that I told them it was ok to spit in the grass! Usually spitting is a no-no! They loved that!

After breakfast we decided to take a venture on a boat. Since I couldn't help to row with holding Kaylee too, we got a boat that Nate could row by himself. The boys had been asking and asking when we could ride on a boat, so this was pretty exciting! Below, the boys are waiting for Dad to pay for the boat rental. Jaxton had found a pokey ball in the dirt that reminded him of the Dr. Suess movie, Horton Hears a Who. The elephant had one of those things in the movie. So he saved it and brought it home with him!

The boat ride was so much fun! It was about 80 degrees by 9:00 in the morning as we set sail and we couldn't have asked for a more beautiful clear day on a picture perfect lake setting.

Mr. Muscle Man

After our boat ride, we went back to the beach to swim again. This time Kaylee got to swim too and experience the sand, which she loved!

It was a great camping trip. Now we are more stocked up with supplies for future camping trips and hopefully we can go more often. The more we go camping the better our nights will be I'm sure. It was great family time, just being together. Cooper told me that one of his most favorite parts of camping was the flashlights. He loved carrying around his own flashlight in the dark and running around with his friends shining his flashlight all around! It will be a fun memory for the kiddos!

Boy's Superhero Bedroom

I finally finished the boy's superhero bedroom. They wanted a superhero theme, and I really didn't want to get tacky with spiderman curtains and such. I wanted some kind of classy superhero look. I found the perfect model on the pottery barn website and we copied their idea to create the most awesome superhero room!

We got brick wallpaper from an online store and I wallpapered just the far wall and around the closet door. So it looks kinda like a city wall. Then all around the other walls we painted 3 feet of navy with a cartoon like city scape on top. I found whole body pictures of different superheros in all different places. The wall decals are so very expensive, so instead, some of these superheros came off of gift bags, party centerpieces from the party store, and even from a couple superhero books. We have ironman, superman, spiderman, batman, and Buzz Lightyear. You'd never know the difference!! The rug we ordered from Sansung Rugs where we got a great deal on a shaggy 3 inch navy rug. And the futon we got so we could have extra sleeping space for visitors and a cozy place to read books and scriptures together before bed.

Nate's sister, Melissa, has her own Cricut machine that cuts vinyl lettering. She let me borrow it and I put this phrase on the wall. If you couldn't tell, its a spin off of Buzz Lightyear's most famous line in Toy Story. Thanks Melissa!

The builder's built these bunkbeds into the wall. It was part of our overall plan and they did a wonderful job! The boys enjoy pretending to be on a pirate ship looking out through their telescopes up on the top. We already had navy blue painted letters for their names from our previous house. I let the boys paint red over top of the navy and then we hot glued them to the wall!!

Jaxton is beginning to learn how to tell time, so we had to add a clock in the room too...

This dresser we also found on Craigslist. It was very old and light oak in color. We painted it with the same paint we used for Kaylee's furniture and the solid piece turned out great! I completed the room with photos of the boys, baby pictures, and brothers pictures, even a superhero shot to go with our theme! I followed the advice I heard at the last general conference to have a picture of a temple in every bedroom. That is the center focus when you first walk into the room. Its often the very first thing you see. The boys love their room, and I had a whole lot of fun putting it together. Its fun to finally know we are not moving again for a while and we can make our house a home!!