Congratulations Lauren!

We went out to Maryland for Carl's sister, Lauren's graduation. She (and also his other sister) are so pretty. We're excited for her to come to BYU-Idaho this fall. We hope to see her a lot.

The fam. (back) Jared, Carl, Ken (aka Pop-pop), Teresa (aka Mom-mom), Chad. (front) Brooke, and Lauren. Carl's youngest brother, Craig wasn't able to come out- We missed you Craig!!

4 generations. Carl's grandpa and namesake. I think this family was all cut out of the same mold.

When you can't stand the heat..

One of the hot afternoons, we took the boys over to a friend's pool to cool off. Logan loved to jump off the diving board and do belly flops. Even though his tummy was all red, he thought it was the funnest thing. Ouch!


Now here's a story of bad mothering. Teresa and I didn't have our swim suits on, just the boys were swimming. Twice-TWICE- Ethan had a near drowning experience. The first time, he was clinging onto Logan, dragging him down. Luckily, they were by the side and we just grabbed their hands. The second time, Ethan was in the middle of the pool. And did his caring, concerned mother jump in to save him. No- I leave that up to the grandma who never sets foot in water at the ocean, pool, what have you. Not that I wasn't going to, but she just beat me to the punch. I guess it's time for swimming lessons.

OUCH! But they all had fun.

What we did...

One cannot go to Maryland and not go to the Amish market in Annapolis. This market is filled with different booths: cheese, deli salads, cakes, donuts, breads, pastries, jarred goods, candy, meat, produce, bbq, and our favorite, the pretzel corner. We love their pretzel dogs and sour cream and onion pretzels. We love this place so much we came twice!
The boys spent all day, everyday swinging on the swings. There was some little neighbor kids they played with all day too. I love the faces on Colton and Pop-pop- so super cute!

The boys love to read books, and even had Pop-pop read to them until I think the last book was read.

Not far from Carl's home is the Naval Academy. Carl has lots of fond memories of games and walking around the base. A close family friend is even the coach for the Navy football team.

This is what wandered into the back yard our last day. The boys loved to play with him and feed him bananas. Logan was sad that we couldn't bring him home.

Three tuckered out kiddos. On the way to the airport, they crashed out. We had great flights home and all sat by each other. We survived a tornado warning (we had to go in the basement for 15 minutes while it passed over), power outages for a day-thus no AC, the heat and humidity, and standby flights. We had so much fun with family that we don't see as often and hope for more trips to come.

**If we had left a day later, we would have been delayed due to storms at least 5 hours. Thank goodness we left on Saturday!