July Recap/ Summer Break

July completely flew by! It consisted of Bryson's three week Summer break so we tried to pack in as much fun as we could.

I started the month off at girls camp with these fabulous ladies! The theme was "It's a Jungle Out There!" and we based the camp around "Survivor" with fun challenges. It was a total blast!

Love these girls...

I got home from girls camp just in time to welcome Bryson home from his last day of first grade. What a stud.

We spent the 4th of July at our local town days. Bryson enjoyed the haystack dive and walked away with a huge bag full of candy.

We visited the fair and Bryson especially loved this water bubble activity...



We ended the evening watching the fireworks across the valley from the top of our house. It was so beautiful!

We enjoyed a day up at our friends Ty & Kami's cabin and spent the day fishing, shooting, 4-wheeling, canoeing and relaxing. We love their cabin!

Mike and Bryson have started fishing on a weekly basis together and enjoyed trying to catch fish from their pond.

Bryson and Saki (our Japanese exchange student) spent hours and hours jumping on the trampoline with cousins and friends. Bryson mastered the front flip and is now trying to master the double front flip. He almost has it down!


We spent a day at Lagoon. Bryson thought he died and went to Heaven. He was finally tall enough to go on Colossus and Wicked and loved them.

This is how Lilly looked on every single ride except on the very slow little boats, the very slow little cars, and the very slow train. She almost smiled on those three rides....haha. She was not a fan of Lagoon.

Lilly's cousin Brody loved holding her and pushing her around in her stroller.

Bryson and Lilly took lots of bubble baths.

We went to see Wicked for the first time with Ty & Kami and loved it!

We also enjoyed several outdoor movies that our city puts on after dark.

We visited the zoo. I hardly recognized the place because it's changed so much since we were last there.

Lilly loved walking with the big kids instead of riding in her stroller.

Bryson played on Granny & Grandpa's big blow up water slide and had fun emptying out the water bags afterward. You'll see in the video why he enjoyed it so much...haha.


 Bryson went to his first live musical at the Hale Center Theater.

Bryson played his first season of rugby with this fine looking group of boys (his cousins).

And the month ended with him starting second grade! His Summer break was short and sweet but he's excited to be back at school and loves his new teacher!

Favortie quote this week:

"Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right."

President Ezra Taft Benson 

Life rules.

Catch Up

It's official. I have become a pathetic blogger. I use to update this thing 3-4 times a week and now I'm averaging only about one post a month and that's on a good month! So today you get a months worth of posts all piled into one. Luck you.

THE SILVER BULLET

This silver beauty has been Mike's commuter car for the past nine years. He's hit a deer in it, the front grill flew off while driving, and he's replaced the entire engine, but it has carried him safely to and from work and has been our little baby. Mike calls it "the silver bullet." I call it his "wind-up car." We have loved having it, dent and all, but we finally felt it was time to say goodbye and let someone else enjoy her in all her glory, so we listed her on KSL and by the end of the day she was gone. It was a sad, sad day, but the 16-year-old girl who bought it was thrilled to have her first car and we know she'll treat our baby well.

12-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Mike and I celebrated our 12 year wedding anniversary on May 14th. Mike surprised me with a private airplane ride over the Salt Lake Valley. We got to fly right over our house (middle house in cul-de-sac) which was really cool .

We also flew over or around five beautiful LDS temples. Our bishop has a plane and was kind enough to take us on the flight. Mike's dream is to learn to fly airplanes or helicopters, so he loved having a mini flying lesson along the way.

OUR FAVORITE MISSIONARIES

Both sets of our parents are currently serving missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mikes parents (left) are serving in Budapest, Hungary (you can follow their blog here) and my parents (right) are serving in the Family History Center in downtown Salt Lake City. They are both doing awesome and we love hearing about all of their amazing experiences.

NEW BIKE

Mike surprised me with a new beachcomber bike for my birthday and I have been peddling it all around town like the Wicked Witch of the West (as Mike teases) ever since. Lilly loves to be pulled behind in her little trailer. I've been trying to bike everywhere I possibly can and was able to make it an entire week without driving my car. It was fabulous!

HOUSE UPDATES

I have been very slowly working on getting our new home decorated. I'll share pictures as I get things finished, but today I'll just share a quick photo of the numbered baskets I added to our mud room lockers.

LADY LILLY

Lilly is growing like a weed. She now weighs 22 pounds and has finally upgraded to a front-facing carseat. She loves to read (she especially loves David books) and is always bringing us books to read to her.

Lilly looks slightly freaky in this picture (even so she's still stinkin' cute), but it shows her sitting like a big girl up at the counter. She absolutely refuses to sit in her high chair and insists on sitting at the counter next to Bryson. She is also walking up and down stairs now and can put on her own socks and shoes.

ART MASTERPIECE

I have been volunteering at Bryson's school a ton this year. I give his class their spelling test each week and I also teach Art Masterpiece twice a month. The eight prints below are the ones I've shared with Bryson's class this year. I have loved teaching the kids about each of the different artists as well as the different principles and elements of design (ie: line, shape, form, space, value, texture, color, balance, contrast, movement, pattern, etc). Art, like music, is such a powerful form of expression and I have loved sharing my love of it with Bryson and his class.

CANCER IS SO LIMITED

My beautiful and amazing little sister Rachel was diagnosed with uterine cancer last month and had to have a hysterectomy in order to remove the cancer. Luckily the cancer was contained to just the uterus and she is now cancer free, but it was definitely a huge scare. Our prayers were answered and we feel so blessed she is still with us. My other amazing little sister Taylor created this beautiful video of Rachel's experience.



PLAYING

Bryson spends every free moment he possibly can playing outside with the neighborhood kids. I had to snap a picture of how cute they looked playing "school" in a box.

YARD GAMES

Now that we finally have a yard, we've been spending a lot of time enjoying it. For Mother's Day Mike gave me some yard games (Bocce & Croquet) that we've enjoyed playing out in the yard as a family.

DANCING

After a hard day of working in the yard there's nothing better than to end the day with dancing. Ever since Lilly joined our family, we've been doing a lot of this lately because she just loves it and can't get enough of it.


Mike cracks me up...


Favorite quote this week:

"If you don't accept excuses, then people will stop giving them and will start looking for solutions."

-Ben Carson

Life rules.

Boy Cousin Sleepover

Our new home has a little more space than our last home, which has been wonderful for entertaining, so we've been doing a lot of it! Last weekend Bryson invited all of his boy cousins over for a sleepover (we were sad Brock couldn't come because he was out of town). They made their own personal pizza's, which all ended up being quite the creations.

They slid down the stairs in their sleeping bags, I'd estimate approximately 50 times each. It was wild!

When Mike got home the boys had a blast playing crack the egg with him. We kept a tally of all of the injuries throughout the evening and if I remember right, this was the final tally: Bryson = 0, Tani = 3, Chazz = 3, Naish = 12. Grand total = 18! Thankfully they were only minor injuries, but we had fun keeping track and adding to the total.

They ended the night huddled around this little DVD player to watch Oz the Great and Powerful.

The boys had a blast and it was fun to spend time with each of them! We missed you Brock!

Favorite quote of the week:

"Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved."  

-Pres. Monson

December Recap

Wow, has it been a crazy month! We've had so much going on that it's been hard to find time to blog about anything, so I thought I'd sum everything up in one very long post. Good luck getting through all of it...haha.

BRYSON & LILLY

These two are bosom buddies and just adore each other. It has been so fun to watch Bryson embrace his new role as a big brother. He's learned how to carefully carry Lilly around the living room and is so gentle and kind with her. We feel so beyond blessed to have these two little ones in our family.


OUR LITTLE MONKEY


Bryson loves to put on performances for Lilly and she loves to watch them. Here's a short clip of one of his recent performances.



TENNIS LESSONS

For the past several months I've been taking tennis lessons with some friends at Liberty Park. It has been a blast and I actually feel like I kind of know what I'm doing now. We have a Monday night tradition where we meet up at the tennis courts and compete against our hubby's and I think us ladies finally have the skills to dominate. The men are going down!


SNOW CAVE

Bryson has been esctatic with all of the snow we've been getting and plays out in it all the time. He's lucky to have a dad that also loves the snow so they've spent endless hours out there together working on a cool snow cave.


KINDERGARTEN PROGRAM


Bryson's school had a Christmas sing-along and this is one of the cute songs he performed (sorry the filming isn't that great).


FARKLE

Bryson got the game Farkle for a white elephant gift and it has become one of our new favorite games to play as a family. Bryson especially loves it because so far he is undefeated and it's not because Mike and I let him win, but because he's stinkin' good!


LIGHTS AT TEMPLE SQUARE

We took Trax downtown to see the lights on Temple Square. The lights were beautiful as always.

Mike's work is within walking distance of Temple Square, so we headed there afterward to warm ourselves up and to enjoy some hot chocolate.


CHRISTMAS EVE

We spent Christmas Eve with my side of the family. The grandkids opened their Christmas jammies from Granny and looked so cute. This picture is of eight of the fourteen Hinckley grandkids.


CHRISTMAS DAY

Being a kid on Christmas morning was always amazing, but being a parent on Christmas morning is SOOO much better. The excitement in Bryson's eyes as he saw and started opening his presents was infectious. He was so cute to watch. He got a castle and a double-sided light saber and said it was the best Christmas ever! Lilly got a few little toys, books, and some clothes. We enjoyed Christmas day with Mike's family. We had a delicious lunch, played games and enjoyed watching Bryson play with his castle.


SLCC INSTITUTE BUILDING


The highlight of our Christmas was by far the day after. My side of the family rented the SLCC Institute building all day and had a blast. We mostly hung out in the gym playing different sports but they also have several pool tables, a ping pong table, and a foosball table, which made for some fun competition.

My niece got a RipStik for Christmas and brought it to practice. I about killed myself trying to ride it but Mike hopped right on it for the first time and rode it around the gym like a pro. He was crazy good at it.

We ordered pizza, had a gift exchange, played board games and just enjoyed ourselves all day. It was so much fun and I'm pretty sure it will become a new family tradition.

Merry Christmas!

Summer Fun

Right now my boys are peacefully enjoying Sunday afternoon naps so I thought it would be the perfect time to sit down and update you on some of our fun Summer adventures!

THIS IS THE PLACE PARK

My brother and his two sons volunteer at This is the Place Heritage Park once a week so we decided to visit them for day to see what they do. Bryson loved it and had so much fun exploring the park with his cousins.

He held baby chickens

...rode on a train

...and panned for gold in a river.

LAGOON

We also spent a fun day at Lagoon. It was Bryson's first time going and it was fun to watch him experience it for his first time.

Here's a 2 minute look at the fun he had on some of the rides:



BIKE RIDES

 We've been on some fun bike rides along the Jordan River Parkway and down to parks near our home.

Hopefully by the end of the Summer Bryson will be training wheel free!

MILLER TIME


Mike's siblings were all in town with their families for a few weeks so we got to spend a lot of time with them. Bryson was thrilled to have all of his cousins around to play with. Nonni planned tons of fun games for everyone to play. Here are some funny clips from one of them (hopefully I don't get disowned by posting this):

Life rules!