~A very special day~

On Oct 8th Nellie made the choice to get baptized.  It was such a wonderful, spiritual day for her and us.  Thanks to all who came and supported her!!

I can't tell...do you think she is happy?!?!?!

Us with Bishop Wilson 

 We had been looking for a dress for her and couldn't find anything we liked that was under $50.  My mom was at the Sears outlet one day and they brought out this dress with a fuzzy shawl. The whole thing was $5!!! It was meant to be :)

 The families from both sides, minus my sister and brother-in-law and Patrick's oldest brother.

Nellie with cousins

Nellie

It's hard to believe that 8 years have gone by!  So much has happened it feels like a life time but at the same time it feels like it was yesterday.  Nellie has grown so much over that last year.  She has become an excellent reader.  She can ride an adult bike with the breaks on the handle bars.  She can now play games with us and understand them! (she loves that)  Those are just some fun things.  She is such a great helper for me.  She loves going to school and is very good at it.  Next Saturday she is getting baptized and is so excited for that.  We got her her very own set of scriptures and case.  It's awesome that she can read them!  

We have some friends that have a daughter that has a birthday 2 days before Nellie.  They are good friends and decided to have a combined birthday party.  They wanted it to be a princess tea party.  We didn't want to leave out family so we had a family party on Friday night and then the kid party on Saturday.  Here are most of the pictures...enjoy! :)

Corina is a professional cake decorator and wanted to do the fancy kid cake, so I did the cupcakes for the family party. 

Does anyone remember that segment in sesame street, long ago, that had the girl rocking in a huge rocking chair?  This totally reminded me of that! LOL

The birthday girls

It was way to windy, so we had them pretend to blow out the candles. ;)

GG and Nellie

Papa and Grandma Susan

~ KID PARTY~

The "tea" and cake table

Make-up and jewelry table

To the left of the picture was the nail station and to the right was the hair station

Nellie after getting her hair done

Samantha begged me to take a picture of her eyes. She did them herself...pretty good too.

All the girls from the party.  The super tall on in the back was a sister of one of the girls there to help us.  She was great!

Birthday girls with their moms.  Corina said we had to dress up too.  Of course she found a great one to fit her...as for me, well I'm a bit bigger than her so it was harder to find something.  Luckily, I have a wonderful mom that can sew.  I found a plain dress at the thrift store and she fancied it up for me.  It will also be my Halloween costume. 

I had to put a picture of this shirt! Isn't it so cute!

Thanks to everyone who came or helped with the parties!  It was so much fun and the girls had a blast!

Staycation ;)

To start our vacation week we went with the Merrill and Collier families to the zoo on Mon.  It was so fun. The kids had a great time!  The animals were perfect too. We got to see just about everything in action.

HELLO!!

The monkeys were SSSOOO loud!  They kept going and going.  Owen couldn't help but become one of them.

The snakes were pretty cool.  Nellie has been having horrible dreams about them so we made a point to see all the snakes we could and show her that they aren't that bad.

I think she was a little freaked out about the dinosaurs.

This is what I get when I say, "hey, can I have a good picture of you guys?"  Have to say it's not the best one ever...but funny.

Owen's first real train ride.  He loved it!  That's all he ever talks about.  

Samantha wanted to be brave and feed the birds.  She was a little scared when it landed on her but after that she did great.  

 Tuesday we went to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and Water Park.  HOLY COW!! If anyone reading this ever gets a chance to go, do it!! It was so cool.  The kids loved it and we did too.  The only thing that would have made it better was to have a sitter or a grandparent there taking pixs and watching owen.  I'm mad that I didn't get any pix.  After the water park, we drove to Depot Bay and spent the night.  Wed we got up and it was beautiful so we went to the beach.  It was windy but so perfect!  After the beach we went to the Aquarium.  It was the first time the kids had ever been there.  Right when we got there they were feeding the anaconda so we watched for a good half an hour.

All owen wanted to do was have a snack.

Men men men men manly men men men.  You know the song.  They had to see who could carry it over....

Patrick won!!

Girls building a castle

Done castle

Best one of the family.  Silly kids 

We got stuck behind these 2 for about 20 min.  

 After the beach on Wed we drove to Oxbow to meet up with the girls scout troop.  We got there at 7:30 and they closed the gates at 8pm.  We still have to get a few things at home so we grabbed a hot dog and went home for the night.  We came back Thur morning, ate breakfast, set up camp, men went fishing and the kids and moms went to the water.  We were at the river for the rest of the day.  It was so beautiful. There weren't that many people there so that was nice.  Again, I didn't have my camera with me but other people took pix.  We did see a lot of deer though and got pix of them.  We camped Thur night and came back Fri morning.

Joe Dirt wig lol :)

Work it!!

More from the zoo. 

Overall we had a pretty good week.  It was a lot of fun stuff packed into a few days but we got it all done and everyone was happy in the end.  So blessed to have great friends to do things with. I would bet it wouldn't have been as fun as it was without them.