Matching Outfits

We had an electrical storm sitting right on us for a while one night.  I was watching a movie while Brandon was at work and the thunder was this low, constant rumble in the background and the lightning just kept flashing.  We also got like 10 pieces of hail that sound like basketballs hitting the roof but I didn't see any actual pieces so I can't tell you how big they were for real...only that they were louder than the average hail hitting the roof/gutter/swamp cooler/whatever else they hit.

I took pictures of the kids in their matching clothes.  It didn't go so well as these last 3-4 days Maddie has been super grouchy and spitting up a lot.  She was too mad to take pictures and soaked her shirt shortly after. I'm also a "cheater" and just edited my pictures to make them better this time around rather than live with the results I got.

Original--Edited

Noah had gotten into some food color the night before and stained his skin on his face.  I tried to tone it down.  Also, he has a large scratch on his upper lip that I tried to take out.

 Original

Edited-- I switched Jubilee's head for one where she was smiling...and I didn't line it up quite right so it looks funny to me.  But maybe if you didn't know I'd done it, it would be okay... I used one from the same photo shoot so that the shadows and stuff would be the same...but my camera made her more "golden" than normal I think.  Hmm....  I also edited the stuff off of Noah and Isaiah's faces.

Original

Edited

When we washed the car, Isaiah slipped on the wet concrete and scraped up his face so I edited the scrapes out.

Madeleine--pretty attached to the binky and you can tell by the red eyebrows that she's pretty mad about being made to be anywhere but someone's lap.  Look how orange her hair is here.  I didn't edit this.  It's natural light (or whatever my camera did to it...because my camera is a bit inconsistent when it comes to natural light.)

Two seconds before she gave up completely and started screaming that her tummy hurt 

Here, have a happy baby instead.  ;)  

I told Emma to stand by the tree and kind of lean on it a little...so Jubilee did it too and I took her picture there.

Water, Water, Water!

How Isaiah runs through the sprinklers...with his tongue out so that he can taste the water, I guess.  

 

Best friends already

We discovered our local swimming pool.
---It's like 5 minutes from home
---It's super cheap (and ages 5 and under are free anyway...)
---it's indoors (read: year round),
---it has a giant slide (that only people able to swim with out floaties can use--sorry kids...)
---it has a "beach" area (I don't know if that's what it's called but essentially the ground slopes down into the water like walking into an ocean...but the deepest it goes is like 1-2 feet.)

---a frog water slide (that Jubilee and Noah pretty much wouldn't stop playing on to try other things.) ---It has pipes that shoot water all kinds of crazy directions with levers and buckets and stuff that fill and dump perpetually

---it has a lazy river that the girls and Isaiah LOVE (the current does all the work for you.  You just sort of drift around)

---It has a waterfall

---it has these floating log things that you can walk on if you are agile enough and if you don't wear floaties (sorry again kids!  Should have taken the camera and gotten a picture of Brandon trying to do it at a run though...pretty funny!)

---and it has a lap pool and a diving board 

(and everything the kids can do is visible from one spot so you can watch them all easily as you play with them)

Anyway, it's pretty cool and we intend to go back but when we told the kids we were going, they were so excited that we got some interesting swimsuit combinations, etc.  :)  Here are our before pictures when they were dressing themselves for the pool. 

Also, I thought of this before going to the pool.  There are expensive gadgets that you can buy to waterproof your phone or camera but when tested against a simple ziploc bag, they perform just as well so I considered taking our camera in a ziploc bag but decided I didn't want to be hanging onto it and didn't quite trust it around that much water.

Me:  Noah, you can't wear your red shirt to the pool like that...
He then produced this face.

Playing with Maddie

All played out 

More water.  We washed the car so it would look pretty for pictures to try to sell it.

Here's what Madeleine did while we washed the car.  (This was a few days after the swimming pool but the camera was still in the bag so I just left it since more water was involved.)

Washing the car.   

The kids thought this was awesome and really wanted to wash the big white car.  Normally we just use the car wash but this time we wanted to do it for fun.   

Washing the inside/windows/dash

or really, mostly just pretending to drive it

Come here, Maddie.  

My head is too big and heavy to do this for long. 

Brothers 

She does this to herself.  The big kids call her a Space girl.   

Running through the sprinklers

...or maybe not...

proof that even Jubilee went through the sprinklers

but mostly she played here on the porch

he mostly played on the patio too 

back here by the trees 

proof that he did in fact get into the yard too at least once

drinking the water

Giggles and Squirms