tey-hos

back in june the kids and i high tailed it out of wisconsin while tyler was cramming for the boards. partly to let him study in peace and partly for my own selfish reasons. i wanted to see my parents and my sisters and my brother! i love, love, love my family. everyone is so positive and happy, we get along amazingly well and most of all, everyone is such good example to me. it's hard not to miss being away from this crew after a while.

it's difficult for me to go through these pictures and try to sum up the trip. there's so much to say about a 12 day trip.

before we headed down to texas, we kept getting emails about my parents setting up a nice box garden in their backyard. i had no idea what that entailed until i saw the actual garden. it was beautiful! my parents have put so much work into that thing and it looked amazing. we spent a couple of morning out by the garden looking around, much to katelyn's delight.

my mother working out in the garden.

katelyn has never been a very good eater. she has never even eaten a carrot before. i think she was wondering why grandma would hand her something like that.

these boots were a favorite and were worn in and out of the house.

more bug chasing. there are lots of bugs here to look at just like in wisconsin, but the bugs are a little bit different and sometimes more exciting to look at.

even benson boy joined us on this trip. this was my first time meeting him. he is such a cute baby, and is only about a month and half younger than tanner.

katelyn and sam became pretty good pals and played together a lot at grandma's house. don't be deceived by all of these outside pictures. we really didn't spend a ton of time outside. it was way too hot out.

we spent one afternoon letting the kids play in grandma's blow up pool. no, we don't have a real one in our backyard. we tried to convince our parents to install one while we were growing up. there's plenty of room, but we could never convince them. we still tease our parents that we are the only ones left in texas without a pool in their backyard.

all of the kids in the pool. i had to wake katelyn up from a nap to come and play, so she was acting a little shy.

my sister, sarah, holding tan the man for me so i could snap some photos

we did so many fun things while in texas, but i barely pulled my camera out. i did manage to get some photos while playing at the bounce house place, but only of the adults. these are two of my sisters and my sister-in-law which we consider one of the sisters.

katelyn was terribly afraid of our outisde cat, but finally warmed up to him by the end of the trip. i think the cat loved the attention. everyone else just ignored her now.

tanner thorougly enjoyed himself on this trip. he won over the hearts of everyone with his million dollar smile as my dad calls it. he had a huge smile plastered on his face literally the entire trip.

i had a chance to take some pictures of these three cousins together. they are so close in age, so it was really fun to have all of them together at the same time.

and of course, we had to take a picture of the boys in the tub together. i'm sure they'll all thank us someday for that.

we had the best time in texas. we were sad to leave everyone, but were grateful for the time we were able to spend with everyone.

bug watching

katelyn is obsessed with bugs. not as in catching and collecting bugs, but as in finding them and killing them. she is not a big fan. i think she developed her dislike for bugs from me, but i promise i tried really hard to act brave.

one of her new favorite past times on the way out to the car is to stop and find some kind of bug, it doesn't matter what, watching it for a bit, then stomping on it.



this girl has a great sense of style. her brothers link chains as bracelets? who would have thought?



you can't forget the sunglasses while bug watching.

found one. and did anyone notice how short katelyn's hair is? the back of her hair has been cut at least 4-5 times in her short three years of life, but not the front. it's taking forever to grow!

the birthday bash

*thank-you so much to everyone who took pictures for me! i wouldn't have any without you guys!

this year i promised myself i wouldn't go all out for katelyn's party. well, that promise was thrown out the window when i saw martha stewart's idea for a carnival themed birthday party. i enlisted two other moms whose daughters had birthdays around the same time of year, and we got to work planning a joint birthday party.

we had four carnival games where kids collected tickets for winning, a prize table to redeem those tickets, and way too many sweets available for everyone to eat. now that all is said and done, i think the party was a success. i absolutely loved that the kids could run around from game to game and play as many times as they wanted without much adult supervision needed. probably my favorite thing about the whole party.

all of these pictures are out of order, but since this is my third attempt at posting about the party, i'm just going to leave it that way. just know that katelyn had a great birthday due to her friends and family who gave very generous gifts, well wishes, phone calls, cards and emails.