clean baby

she's not too sure about this

hahahahahahahaahaha!

Pool

My little sister Amanda just became a lifeguard and we went to pick her up a couple hours early to play in the water.  Ellie hates it outside and cries every time I take her out of the house but since we were in the water she didn't care.  She wasn't sure what we were doing but she didn't cry.  I can't wait for her to love the water just like her mama.

Here's Amanda the lifeguard who is afraid to get wet.  

Thank you Maren for Ellie's swimsuit!  We are so lucky that it fits her at the right time!  

I on the other hand, do not fit into my old swimsuit so I had to order a new one to fit my new "hot mama" body.  I got it from Lime Ricky and I love it! And if you type JENSWIM into the coupon code box at the end you get 10% off! yaay!  I love how they have modest and cute swimsuits!

I accidentally clicked the two day shipping and it was real expensive. I don't recommend it.

Adams graduation

My littlest/biggest brother Adam graduated and now he is heading off to BYU next week! His graduation was good even though he didn't look around to try and find us, he just had his eye on the prize.

 So I would post the vertical pic of my mom and Adam together but in this picture you can see where Adam got his smirk from.  It's like I'm seeing double with the brow wrinkle, the one-sided smile, and the look of uncertainty and questioning authority.

 Afterwards we went to Texas Roadhouse for dinner.  Congrats Adam!

Hyper in her diaper

Here's Ellie hyper in her diaper.  If you're into babies, cuteness, and for all that is good in this world you'll like this video. Once you think she is done she starts right back up again. Oh the humanity!

Caution: Dorky Rant

McKay, my bro's, and I went to go see Snow White and the Huntsman and I loved it! At the end they should have kissed and rode off into the sunset.  I love cheesy endings even though it's considered trite.  And I think Kristen Stewart did a better job acting than she has in the past, even though her mouth was still hanging open and she was panting the entire time.  It's like she just woke up from the dead how out of breath can she be? but i digress. I loved this movie! It's the best one I have seen in a long time

I also can't wait for this video game!  It's looks so cool! This time you are an Assassin in Early America during the Revolution who is half Native American and half Colonist who fights the British.  Apparently you can run around in the woods, early New York, and early Boston just like how you did in ancient Rome (the first game).  Instead of having historical characters like Leonardo Da Vinci you have Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others.  So I don't know when I will ever get the time to play it but maybe I"ll just have to stay up all night and blame it on Ellie. So if you have youngins around you might not want to watch this with them, there is a lot of violence, just a heads up.  Man, being a nerd has never been more fun!

OOoooo! I'm geeking out here!

AHHH! Cool!

AHHHH!!EFjiofpw4jeigofjwnraeiopgw i'msoexcitedi'mtypingrandomletters aifodjhperjbigerebjpaetogijreagopreaoigaeopgrhie

Rain

We had another torrential downpour last week, tornado included.  What's up with the tornados here all the sudden?  Anyway I tried to take a rainy picture and this is what I ended up with.  I like how there is only one main drop in the picture. I previously tried to photoshop ten drops in a picture together but i don't think it looked as good as the simplicity of one drop (the original image).

So i don't know what do you think? Which one is better? (please don't judge my horrible photoshop skills, I kinda gave up in the middle)

We had a river running through our yard with all the rain too.  Check it out

Ruth and Boaz... lol

would you still love me?

"mama,"

 "would you still love me if i looked like this?"

of course, of course!
haha

Stonewall Jacksons Arm

While we were at Lake Anna my grandparents went around and visited the nearby battlefields Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania.  Papa took this picture of Stonewall Jackson's arm in Chancellorsville. They buried his arm in its own grave instead of throwing it in a mass grave of limbs which is what they did with all of the other amputee's appendages.  I guess there are certain benefits of being a General.

It is interesting how many people died in the Civil War, the battle of Fredericksburg had 18,000 casualties, Spotsylvania 32,000, Wilderness 29,000, and Chancellorsville 24,000!!  Since it was such a long time ago it's easy to forget that the civil war had more casualties than any other war in American History (620,000)

Lake Anna, VA

One of my favorite places to be is just a short walk and a jump from here.  Which happens to be the warm waters of Virginia. I consider this place a home away from home since I spent almost half of my childhood here.  I could take millions of pictures but I am afraid of taking my camera out on the water.  We were here for a week and the water felt so nice contrasting against our triple digit weather.

Here's the view from our cove out to the main part of the lake.

  I had forgotten how much I love to ride in the front of the boat.

Other boats on the dock, and the bass weed.  And speaking of bass one of my favorite memories of the lake is seeing the bass tournament at the local marina.  From our boat in the distance I loved to watch everyone race to their secret fishing spot and come back for the weigh in where everyone struggled to bring their flopping bag of bass to the weigh in.

I think McKay had fun too!

One of my most favorite things to do is swim eye level with the water and look at the light reflecting off the surface (it's even more fun when you do it while it's raining, during a sunset, underneath the water, or when you are the only one in the water and the water has turned into a smooth sheet of glass.)  I would have loved to take a picture to show you what I was talking about but I was having too much fun.

Grammy and Papa, Aunt Linda, Nancy, Marissa, and Uncle Steve also came.  It was after all a family reunion. And yes, I got sunburnt so bad, now I am peeling, peel peel... fun.

So McKay tried waterskiing for the first time and he is a quick learner.  We also did some tubing and would have done some wake boarding but apparently the wakeboard is lost.  Anyway here he is, and on his first try he got up!  He has greatly improved since this video and now wants to try slalom skiing.

Who is this crazy?

Nature walk at Lake Anna

So the reason why I went without technology for a week is because I was in Virginia at Lake Anna.  There is no cell phone signal, internet, nothing, you are literally cut off from the world. In fact they just built a grocery store so now we don't have to make the 45 min (oneway) trip to get groceries.  Yay!  So without technology Lake Anna makes you spend more time outside, and with the people you love.  And that is only one of the things that makes it so awesome.  

I took Ellie out on a nature walk and she liked it because it was a shady and cool(ish).  She likes to kick her feet and rest them on the dash of the stroller.  We gave up halfway through the walk and turned back because there were too many fallen trees from this past winter. 

My grandpa (Papa) is really good at photography and he was giving me some tips to shoot really crystal clear photos.  So these mushrooms were taken at f16 and I forget what the shutter speed was.  But if you zoom in you can still see many details and I most def shot this with a tripod (well technically it was with a stool but whatever).