Ella's in town

My neice Ella came into town to spend a week with us. We were so excited to have her here especially for the 4th of July. She has become good Facebook/Texting friends with Taz's friend Sierra and so Sierra came over and they met for the first time face to face.  Sierra made her this sign with all her favorite things on it.

They watched a lot of Youtube videos (On the kitchen floor I don't know why??)

Ella did Cynjyn's hair with her wand and now C wants one.  It turned out soo cute.

They had an all night Harry Potter marathon.  They brought down all the books so they could debunk what was in the books but not the movies.  They started out in our room, then...

...we made them move to the LR when we went to bed.  This is how they started: (Taz went to bed shortly after this picture, he wasn't staying up all night!)

They ended at 8am.  The girls stayed downstairs to sleep, Tanner managed to move himself upstairs to his bed.

Sierra came over a few times to swim.  We also took her with us to see Amazing Spiderman on opening day.

They had fun in the pool.

We made bleached t-shirts which was an idea we got off Pinterest.  Cynjyn did a One Direction shirt.

Ella did Harry Potter.

They turned out really cute.  (FYI if you do this, the darker the shirt, the better).

They wanted me to do a photo shoot of them, so since I'd been taking a photography class I obliged. 
These are unedited photos, but still turned out cute.

It actually rained on the 4th of July.  We had a back up plan of an indoor picnic and Redbox, but the weather cleared, so we headed out to Boulder City.  I am so glad we decided to go.  The rain cooled down the temp and it was in the 80's and beautiful weather.  We got our normal spot and set up. We took homemade sub sandwiches and watermelon and chips and brownies and rice krispi cookies. We brought cards and bocce ball and played and talked and ate.

I had made homemade bubble solution and Garry made us a giant wand and we took it and played.  IT was so much fun and so cool.  We probably have about 100 pictures just of it.  I am not exagerating either.

Bocce ball

Eating and waiting.

I also brought some glowsticks and so we brought those out when it got dark. 

The firework show was great and the finale was probably the best one yet.  We got home in time to stop off at Sonic for half price shakes.  We came home and had a few sparklers left over from last year, so the kids did those outside while Garry and I put the stuff away.

And that was our 4th!

The next day I took them to the Springs Preserve.  They were having a venemous animal display and they kids had fun on the exhibits.  We also saw the live venemous show (Interesting with 4/5ths of us afraid of snakes!)

Ella and Cynjyn did a lot of swimming!

And we broke out the bubble wand again and got some more cool pictures. 

I love this toy!

Today, I had to do the food shopping for Girls Camp which is coming up in a week, so I sent the 4 of them off to the Adventuredome for the day. And that will end our week with Ella. Tomorrow, I leave for Oregon!

Summer

Gotta love summer time. So many fun things to do. Taz had his friends over and introduced them to Walking Dead.  Yes, they got permission from their parents to watch the show.  It's a little intense, but such a good show.  They had a little marathon and finished Season 1 in two days. 

Cynjyn has been going to the swim parks a lot with the Hollands.  This day after swimming the preteens came over here to hang out.  Bethany, Cynjyn, Grady and Sean. They sat up on our potshelves for an hour just talking and hanging.

Then they had a wicked game of Just Dance.

Karen is the first counselor in YW and over camp.  She texted me earlier in the week to see if I was interested in helping her make tutus and wands for our skit up at camp.  We are the Woodland Fairies of Light as our ward theme.  And that's how we roll, making stuff we need at the witching hour approaches.  So, we enlisted the help of Tanner and he cut tulle while Karen and I wrapped them around elastic. 

So, here is how we made the wands:  a dowel wrapped with tulle and a styrofoam ball hot glued to the top. 

Then we took little squares of cut tulle and bunched them at the bottom and pinned them to the ball.

Tanner was kept pretty busy cutting enough squares to keep out little pile of tulle stocked since me, Karen and Amanda were all doing wands.  In between cutting tulle, he helped pin wands.

Pinning, pinning, pinning all afternoon...14 wands to make!

Then we tied a strip of tulle around the bottom of the ball and wahlah, we have wands people.

Not Tribbles, wands!!  So cute and we loved how the finished project turned out!