The other night my folks treated us to an evening at the rodeo. It was just a small rodeo in Alpine, but we had lots of fun watching everything from mutton busters to bull riders. Luckily there were no injuries during the event, but we did almost get rained on which might have been just as tragic for the girls. I didn’t get any good pictures of the action, but I did get a few of jack in his cowboy hat. He was definitely a hit with the ladies.

Hailey started back to school on July 28th!  It  was a day for celebrating.  We got a new school this year.  It takes 10 minutes to walk to.  It is so nice to have it so close.  School ends 20 miinutes earlier and there isn’t a long bus ride home so I feel like we have gained an hour in each day.  It’s wonderful.  Hailey is  now a second grader and I am in shock.  I don’t know how this happened.  I remember everything about second grade because it was only a few years ago, so how do I have a daughter having these same experiences! Hailey’s teacher’s name is Emelie Larson.  Kind of funny huh? ( my maiden name is Emily Laursen, if you didn’t know) She seems very fun. There is a set of triplets in her class and atleast 4 kids, that we know of, have twins in their families! Crazy! So we think she belongs in this group. The strange thing about our track this year is that it is week three of school and we are going off track!

Go Falcon Ridge!

I know this is late but I just had to brag about how much Mike loves me. 

The night of the Breaking Dawn release I decided not to go get the waited for book because I was going to go to the Layers Clothing sale early the next morning.  So I was very surprised when I woke up at 12:40am to a huge thud on my chest. I opened my eyes and Mike was smiling at me and said "There’s your book!" It took me a second to realize what he was saying.  Then I had to wake up all the way to hear the story because Mike thinks that me and my books are silly. The thought of him standing in line waiting made no sense. 

He had a new part on his motorcycle and had to give it a test ride and decided that he should go drive by Barnes and Noble and see how long the line really was.  He said it was crazy. Girls in prom dresses, limos…..and a huge line.  So he drove away laughing.  Then he passed Walmart and thought he would give it a try.  So he walked in and saw a big pile on a table and no line.  So he walked over and bought it with no fan fare! 

And that is how I got my book.  So of course I couldn’t just leave it on the dresser waiting for tomorrow.  I was too curious.  And then on Monday when Mike came home and not much housework was done, I reminded him that it was his fault.  But I finished it that night and now life can go on. 

For the past couple weeks Annie has been testing out her standing skills. She would pull herself up to everything and then get as far away from her support as possible without actually letting go. Until about a week ago…

She finally decided that holding onto stuff was just holding her back so she decided to let go and venture out into the wonderful world of walking. That was a week ago. Now she’s a walking pro. She stands herself up without aid and walks all over the house. She’s pretty much given up crawling entirely. Where did our baby go?

Well, we’ve still got Jack I suppose. He currently shows no interest in walking. In true male fashion, if he can’t be carried to where he wants to go, it’s really not worth the effort to get there. Lazy butt.

UPDATE: Wow… I totally failed to notice that this was post number 100 for us. Hooray for Annie and hooray for our ability to prattle on about random nonsense on at least 100 individual occasions. Hopefully it won’t take another year to get to number 200.

Don’t ask me why they misspelled Carnival, but they did. It wasn’t my choice, but that’s how they decided to spell it… whatever.

Anyway, this past Saturday it was once again time for the Omniture Summer Party. This year, instead of making us all show off our cubicle ravaged, farmer tanned bodies at the pool, they decided to have a carnival at Thanksgiving Point. There were rides and food and games and clowns and balloons and fireworks and a midway and general carnival fun. We got there a little late so we didn’t get to see everything (Hailey was rather bummed that she didn’t get to play on the big blow-up maze thingy), but we did get to go on a few rides and watch some fireworks.

First the girls went on a fun little cow train ride which consisted of a tractor pulling around a bunch of little “cow” cars. Hailey and Mallory loved it. Next we went on the big spinny tilt-o-whirl thingy. Both the girls figured it would be fun… it wasn’t. Hailey did good on it, but Mallory had a full on freak-out melt-down. She screamed loud enough that the guy running the ride decided to stop the ride and let her off. She was grateful for that. After that we decided to go on a nice slow ferris wheel ride. Unfortunately, the guy running the ferris wheel didn’t think it should be that leisurely of a ride and cranked it up to 11. This resulted in freak-out number 2 for Mallory. However, in her defense, it was quite an exhilarating ride coming over the top at jet fighter speed. Mallory screamed for about the first 30 seconds straight then stuffed her face in my lap and held onto my leg with her Kung Fu death grip. Luckily she survived. I was actually quite surprised that Annie and Jack both managed to keep from crying. Annie would go rigid as a board every time we came down the front and would then look at me once we got to the bottom with a “wow… that was a weird sensation. Let’s not do that again.” sort of look.

Once we were done with the torture chamber rides, we headed over to the stage to watch the band and the fireworks. We had some ice cream and everything turned out swell. Thanks Omniture for another fun summer party.