Merrill Reunion

This weekend the girls and I were able to make it to West Pine Girls Camp for our Merrill Family Reunion. Ryan was unable to go because he was very busy working on the house and I am very grateful for that!!!! (so he was excused from the reunion).(but he really missed out)
We all had such a great time and ate such great food! It is so nice to see family, and have some great conversations, laughs and see how everyone has changed, grown up, ect.
Each family was in charge of making a flag for their family. This was the flag that we made, and it was the bestest flag ever!!!

We made sure to put some things on it that would represent our family. So we put, camping, happy (yellow smiley face) accidents (red cross), john deer for my dad, and trains for my dad and Jex, Rhino rides, (the mountain has a little rhino on it), love, travel, (the little blue boat) faith, (the little book of scriptures) an the skull at the bottom says farting.... (we may be a little gassy)
Annette and me working hard on the flag
Summer, Annette and Cache making a funny face! (I love Caches face in this one)!
Annette wins on the best funny face for this one
I am so proud of our flag
Check out the dirty little faces!!! Brytlee and Cache were able to sleep in the same room and Brytlee was so excited! She kept talking and talking and talking to him, and he just kept saying, "be quiet"! They finally fell asleep, and when Annette, Summer and I went into the room to go to sleep Cache in his sleep says so cute, "I want some hot chocolate".
We played all kinds of games! They had a bean bag toss, a balloon thing... where you throw the darts and pop them.... (I was really good at that, I got three out of five balloons)
We also had a fish pond, a duck matching game, and lots more! The kids all loved it

My Grandma and Grandpa Merrill
We had a competition to see who could make the best desert and my Grandma Merrill won! That goes to show you that there is nothing better than Grandma's cooking!
The slide!



The first time I went down the slide Brytlee and Elizabeth wanted to go with me... so we all went down and we were going so fast! We flew off of the bottom and I tried to grab the girls and stand up but I twisted my ankle and so I dropped and jumped over them and did a few summer salts. If we would have had a video camera we would have won on AFV for sure.
But after that you would have thought I had learned my lesson.... but when the kids want to go down the slide you have to take them... so I did it again and had the same thing happen again.
I figured out if you go down without sitting on the rugs you don't go as fast..... so I did that from then on and we were safe.... (the girls didn't get hurt at all going down the slide, just I did)






Elizabeth was so excited to get her birthday presents from Grandma and Grandpa Merrill!
My dad picked out her present all by himself and he did a great job! She loved all the gifts and couldn't have been happier!





We had such a great time!!!

Elizabeth is Five!

My little Elizabeth turned 5!!!! I can not believe that she is five. It feels like it was not that long ago that she was my little baby......
We had a little birthday party for her with our family and a couple of friends....(who I thought I had invited.... and then called to ask where they were, and then realized I had forgotten.....)
The birthday cake was a barbie cake


She couldn't wait to open her presents!
She was so nice to let everyone help her open a present.







She looks so determined to get that candy out!


Ryan was helping Brytlee and was swinging a little to hard and when he swung the bat he swung Brytlee also... she really didn't like it at all.

Great Grandma Thomas.

What a sweet heart! I love Elizabeth so much. She is such a good friend and I love everything about her.
some of the things that are so great about her
.... she can make friends with anyone, and is best friends from the time they meet
..... she can always make you laugh or smile
. ... she loves to play, and is always ready to "get playing"
....she has a very kind heart.
..... she is such a "smarty pants"
....she loves to pretend and play dress up, she is such a girly girl and loves to be a princess and anything else that is sparkly and beautiful
.... she is such a great big sister to Brytlee and is so cute with her
..... I can go on and on, but my girls are fighting right now so it just made it hard to think of any more good things right now....
I love you Elizabeth!

Soccer Players

Alexis and Elizabeth are in soccer this year. They both had their first game this Friday and they both won... (well Alexis's team tied, so we call that a win)





You can tell that this is Elizabeth's first year playing. She didn't really know what to do and was very board at times. She would lay down, sit and pick the grass, and then one time she was hot and tired and laying down... the ball came up to her and hit her and so she just sat up and looked at me like "what do I do now"?
Alexis is doing really well. You can tell that she has played before and she was really aggressive at getting after the ball. She ran the whole time she was in and did a good job.

House

We are still working on our basement.... we have been waiting on a guy to come and get the walls put up on the outside of the panels so we can get the concrete done. But the walls are all up and the windows are put in.



When we go and help Ryan, or go to hang out.... the girls get to play in the hills of dirt! They love it!!!! But they are covered from head to toe in dirt when we go home.....



This is going to be our cold storage room. I am so excited to have places to put everything!

Such a stud!

A little behind'

I have been busy and have not had a chance to get a few things written down so I am going to try and get caught up.
Alexis is in the second grade and is loving it. I was so sick that I could not take her on the first day of school. I had some kind of flu that made me throw up every ten minutes and I had the worst headache ever. Even after I got better my ears would not stop ringing for a week. So because I was so sick for her first day of school the pictures are of the second day of school. She is really loving her class and her teacher and one of her best friends is in her class this year ( she is so happy about that).

We have a great garden this year and have been eating corn every day for the past few weeks and it is sooooooooooo good!!!! We grew peppers this year, and it is our first year of getting our peppers to produce! So we were really excited to see that we got such huge peppers!


I picked a bunch of our veggies and canned some yummy salsa with it all. It is the best Salsa in the world, and we should be getting a bunch more tomatoes and peppers this week so we can do another batch (maybe even a couple)
I need to go and take some more pictures of the house.... I have been a slacker on keeping up with it. We pored the footings a while ago and the guys that came and helped could not believe how perfect they were. They all gave Ryan lots of complements on how great they were and told him he needed to go and teach the contractors how to do it. I went to see them working on it but when I got there they were already done. I said, 'wow, you were fast" and they guy helping said, 'it isn't hard to do when your husband did the perfect forms". So I was proud of him for that!
We have gotten the walls started and some of the plumbing is done so now I need to go over and take some more pictures of the walls going up.
We also had a family reunion this past week with Ryan's Mom's side of the family, the Thomas family. We all went to Lava Hot Springs and it was a lot of fun. The girls all loved swimming and going on all the slides. Alexis and Elizabeth even went on the new slide that is very big and fast. (Alexis loved it and went three of four times, but I don't think Lizzy loved it... once was enough for her).
Alexis wanted to jump off one of the plat forms but them chickened out when she got up there. Latter on in the day she started playing around on the diving boards. She started to dive off of the lower one, and then worked her way up to diving off of the higher one. Then when she had perfected her dive she decided to start doing front flips. I could not believe she was doing it, but she was having a ball and then even started to do the front flips on the high diving board. She is a lot braver than I thought she was and it was so cool to watch her do it. I felt really old because when I got up to do it.... I wasn't so sure I really wanted to do it... I did do it, but it wasn't pretty....