#43 for Me

My sweet fellas treated me to a birthday celebration tonight!

I'm turning 43 tomorrow, but we'll be at the Growing Kids Sale, so we celebrated tonight.

 

They even got me a cake! :)  (And it's chocolate!!)

 

These boys are my favorites in the whole world!!!

 

And this guy is my very most favorite!!

 

A birthday tradition...  gift parade!  So fun!

Feeling very blessed!



My Grandpa Turns 98!

We got to celebrate his 98th birthday last weekend!

 

Such a fun time!

 

Happy 98th Grandpa!!!

Love you!

 



August Birthdays at the Wassons

Always fun to celebrate birthdays!  This month is Will and Kim and me. 

He's loving the batman costume! :)  And looking quite buff!

 The cousin picture!  (I was sad that it turned out kinda blurry.)  But I'm loving the personalities here!

 

 Look at the yummy ice cream cake. :)  Fun to celebrate with Kim!

 

Shelley always makes the most wonderful meal! 

Blessed and grateful!!!

Apple Pickin' Time

We've had an extremely bountiful harvest of apples this year!  Last weekend the boys picked apples from one of the Gala trees and got 12 bags of apples - each bag about 20 lbs!!  And there were still apples on that tree when they finished. 

I wish I could show my Instagram video here of the boys picking the apples!  It was hilarious!  They were shaking the apples out of the tree onto a tarp that the boys were holding and they kept getting hit in the head with apples.  Apple pickin' is dangerous!  (at our place anyway!) LOL.

 

 

That's a LOT of apples!  Okay, so let's just add apple processing to one of our busiest weeks of the year!  My mom came on Monday and we spent the entire day cutting, chopping, cooking apples!  We ended up with 21 jars of applesauce and about 14 jars of apple butter.  The boys helped...  although they weren't too crazy about it...  but it was great to have extra hands operating the apple corer/peeler/slicers!  Those things are amazing and have made the job much easier!  And I was excited to figure out how to make apple butter in the crock pot!  Yippee!

I made even more apple butter again today! 

APPLE ABUNDANCE!!!!



Naturals Baseball Game

Our first time to go to a Naturals baseball game!  What a great way to end the summer!  We really enjoyed it.

Couldn't believe that they put us on the Sweetheart Cam! 

Kissy!  Fun!

 





 

Looking forward to trying to go again next year!

Back to School

We started easing back into school in late July.

I've really enjoyed doing it this way!  We've never done it quite like this before.  Normally, we pick a first day and try to do everything.  Recipe for failure. ;)  It's not nearly so overwhelming to just add in a new subject every so often.  The plan is to be at full schedule when we start back again after GKS.

 

So, we just took school pictures last weekend.  The sun was setting and I realized this would be a good time to take pics.  We hurried!!  But we made it...  so here's our pics.

The whole crew...

 Josiah - 8th grade!

 Shepard - 3rd grade!

 Will - Kindergarten!

 

 

Growing in wisdom and knowledge!  (We hope!)



Will the Birthday Boy

We were all exhausted when we got home from camp, but we managed to take Will to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner (his request).  It was fun...  we were just all so tired.

 

Will is excited to be 6 years old now!!

 

(The highlight of the day!  Seeing Josiah's heart toward his little brother!  He gave Will one of his games and carefully, patiently showed him how to play it.  Will was ecstatic!)  Special moment!!

 

Happy Birthday to Will!

He's definitely the spark in our family...  we adore him! (when he's not breaking something) LOL. 

So thankful for this little guy!!

 



NLR Family Camp 2013

Fun!  Fun!  Fun!

We had such a great time at Family Camp again.  It's so fun to be at the Ranch again and share it with our kiddos.  It's always one of the highlights of our summer.

 

Just gotta say that the speaker this year was exceptionally great!

 

This is going to be a major photo dump!

Family Camp 2013:

 

Skeet shooting!

John is awesome at this!

Josiah tried it for the first time...  not his favorite thing.

 

Mr. Legolas  here!  Seriously, he shot just like him and he did great!

 

Getting ready for the ropes elements...

 

At the SCREAMER...

 

Time for the ZIP LINE...

 

Doing it all again... (the next day!)



 

 

Josiah is conquering the climbing wall...

 

VICTORY!!

Ya, BABYYY!

Love this pic of Will with our summer staff guy, Mr. Mitchell.



 

Screamer again for this guy...

 

Will and Josiah were excited to learn how to do a flip off the diving board!

Mr. Mitchell could do a double flip.  So, Will told me he was working on his double.  I asked him how that was going.  He said, "Not so good". :)

 

The after-camp family pictures!

 

Love this place!

Love what they are doing there...  it's changed so much over the years.

While the heart and message of the gospel are still the same, the improvements to the facilities and programs are really wonderful.

 

I know that's a lot of pictures, but it's still only just a tiny snapshot of everything we got to do.

There was creek hiking, canoeing, kayaking, making hobos, carnival night, game room, carpet ball, singing fun songs and playing silly games, and so much more!