4 days...

We leave for Cancun in FOUR days!!! Joshua and I are sooo excited! The monkeys are looking forward to JoJo and PaPa coming to stay with them and we are all excited to be able to celebrate my dad's 60th birthday while they are here visiting!! So this will be my last post before we leave...

First thing is first...update on the World's Largest Swimming Lesson---

We broke the record!! Emilee, Trevor and Carter are official Guiness Book of World Record participants!! Here are a few fun pictures from our favorite summer activity.

Emilee and Trevor LOVE to go across this obstacle course that is set up over one side of the pool. They spend half the time we are there, hangin' and trudging across these lilly pad thingies while hanging from an overhead rope bridge.
Carter's favorite past time at the pool is splashing...splashing Mommy, splashing nothing, splashing himself! (And doesn't he look ADORABLE in his sunglasses?!)
Trying for a pose with all three but Carter just wouldn't look at the camera.
We skip nap on pool days, and Carter usually ends up resting for a bit in the shade on one of the deck chairs.

So the main reason for our trip to Cancun is to celebrate our 15th Wedding Anniversary (which is tomorrow)! Here's a before shot...

and we'll have a fun "15 years later in Cancun" pic to share when we get back!

And the rest of the pictures are from a collection I shot trying to get a nice collage put together for Father's Day cards. So the monkeys and I headed over to our lake park...and I am pretty impressed at some of the shots I got.

Special Weekend!

I've become incredibly close with my neighbor, Jamie, over this past year...and our husbands have become fast friends as well. Weekend before last the guys cooked up a plan to send us ladies away for a "break" from the kiddos and life at home. Jamie was flabbergasted as being sent out of town was a first for her, and though I was surprised, it wasn't a terribly foreign concept for Joshua to come up with an elaborate surprise break out of town for me. So for three nights over Memorial Day weekend, Jamie and I flew off to San Antonio and we had THE.MOST.AMAZING.TIME! We were greeted at our hotel by this from our hubbys... and spent time by the peaceful pool reading our books and enjoying our treat.
We hung out on the Riverwalk and enjoyed lunch waterside. (Gabby also made the drive to meet us and hang out for the day...but I didn't get a nice picture with her *boo*.)
Posing on a bridge on the Riverwalk...
Jamie was tickled by the Texas shaped waffles on the hotel breakfast bar!
And we enjoyed some amazing chinese takeout while relaxing in our room doing NOTHING hahaha!
And while Jamie and I were blissfully recharging hundreds of miles away (we also saw a movie, took a riverboat cruise and watched waaaaay too much Bridezilla on tv haha!), Joshua and the kids and Jamie's husband and our other neighbor, Bill, decided to get energetic and build an entire pergola for our backyard!! Jamie and I were shocked the guys would tackle such a huge project while they were home with all 4 monkeys...but as you can see, they did an amazing job! We now have a wonderful upgrade to our backyard, complete with mister system to help cut the icky summer heat!

Joshua, thank you for being so generous to send us ladies away to recharge AND for creating such an awesome project for our entire family (and neighbors!) to enjoy!! You are THE BEST!!

School is almost out!!

We had quite a bit going on as school wound down.

When we got our annual water park passes, we also got a free annual pass to the local amusement park. We decided to hit it before the summer heat was toooo miserable to enjoy it.
The two big hits were the carousel and the train that runs the perimeter of the park!!
Trevor participated in chess club this year at school and this is a picture from his end-of-year chess tournament.
And this is a pic of all of the awards that Trevor earned at the end-of-year assembly...some included Most Tidy, Excellence in Reading and Social Studies, and recognition for being a Safety Patrol member!

And click below on the little thumbnail. Emilee's choir did a Spring Concert and this was one of their songs. They not only sang it, but danced as well. Emilee is in the front row, toward the right and her friend who's blind is on her left. Emilee put in hours of effort after school helping her friend learn the dance moves the best she could and we were all very proud of both of them!



And last but not least, Carter and I got to meet Daddy for a last "three of us" lunch date before the big monkeys got out of school for the summer. We went to one of our favorite restaurants by the lake and I snapped these pics before we went in to eat...
For some unknown reason, Carter is our "flower boy", always wanting to pick and collect ANY flower he sees...so he's showing off his current find!

Mother's Day

I'm hoping to get a TON of posts up today to catch up from the last month or so! Stay tuned!!!

These next pictures are a bit of a Mother's Day update. Joshua and the kids built me a garden for Mother's Day. I've been sooo missing gardening since we left CA five years ago; several moves and being pregnant has gotten in the way of getting a decent garden in and thriving. I shared the construction pictures a while back...now here's the "planting" and "halfway there" pics...
Carter planted some strawberries...
Emilee got the tomatoes in...
And now look how wonderful it's doing! We have gotten to eat a couple of delicious strawberries, and we now have some teensy bell peppers and squash sprouting. Hopefully by the end of summer we'll be enjoying tons of fresh tomatoes, peppers, squashes and beans!!
We flew Joshua's mom in for a visit over Mother's Day week and we got to go downtown and see the Oklahoma City National Memorial (this year is the 15th Anniversary of the bombing).
And these flowers were a creation that the kids made for Cathy, myself and our neighbor for Mother's Day from wild flowers that grow in the field behind our house. All three of us were super touched by their project!!

World's Largest Swim Lesson

White Water Bay Takes Part in World's Largest Swim Lesson - News9.com - Oklahoma City, OK - News, Weather, Video and Sports

Emilee, Trevor, Carter and I took part in an attempt at breaking this Guiness Book of World Record yesterday. Click on the above link to see the story. Towards the right of the text there is a video link. Click that to watch the news story. To help you spot us...Emilee is in a pink one piece bathing suit, Trevor is an orange swim shirt and orange swim shorts and Carter is in green (you can see him best with me when we were doing "jumps"). We all had a great time and learned a few things too!!

I'll get some fun pics we took yesterday up later on, but I wanted to get the news link up ASAP! I'll also hopefully have the news as to whether or not we actually broke the record! Stay tuned!!