My Carnivorous Children

All 3 of my children have shown a love for meat very early in life. Jaxon loves it when we have ribs and give him some to chew on. Our girls were the same way. While we were in a hotel we were eating out quite a bit, and everytime we asked Lyla what she wanted to eat she'd ask for either steak or bacon. Mckayla has been asking to have her own salad that she doesn't have to share lately, but she still always wants bites of Daddy's steak.

A couple of more awesome AZ pics

One of my favorite things about Arizona is our awesome skies. Texas doesn't have skies like Arizona. They are especially awesome during July and August's monsoon season with the huge pilling clouds. We've been enjoying the views since we arrived.
This is a lizard picture from the hike, taken on behalf of the girls. But it was a pretty cool shot, so I threw it in here.
Awesome mountain views from our hike.
More incredible sky pics.
This is the girls on a huge rock. (As if I needed to write that.) Hikes as a family are really slow because they love to look at nature. They kept trying to find bigger and bigger rocks, and were very excited when we came across this one about 10 minutes into the hike.

Fun in Arizona

For fun, we went on a hike up Ramsey Canyon, right in Sierra Vista. It is a wildlife preserve for hummingbirds. It is home to several (I don't remember the number) different species of hummingbirds. It is also a very beautiful hike, though it turned out to be a bit more challenging than we originally thought. But we all survived alright. The overlook is in Cornado National Forest, but it is a really pretty view.
This is Jake being a daredevil.
This is just a really cute pic of Lyla. They were a bit camera happy the whole time and kept posing and asking us to take pictures. Not to mention the dozen or so pictures we took on their behalf of cool rocks, leaves, beatles, etc. But I'll spare you those shots.
This is just a shot of when the trail began to get a bit steeper and turned into more of a hike than a nice weekend stroll in the mountains.
This is Joey and his fiance Ashley who came on the hike with us. He is being hired by Northrop Grumman and will be moving here in September. They are really awesome, and we are excited to have them move to Sierra Vista.

Jake's real Birthday

We celebrated Jake's real birthday in a hotel room, but we had a great time. We went out to dinner and then came home for cake and presents. The girls of course had to lend a hand in the opening of the presents.
We got a birthday cake from cold stone, though the old geezers' candles nearly melted the ice cream cake.
We nearly set the smoke alarm off with all of those candes, but at least he got to make a wish!

Back to Arizona

After our quick stint in Utah we went back to Arizona for Jake to start his new position with Northrop Grumman. As we continued forward with the purchase of our home, we ran into more than a few snags. The home inspection showed us that there were several several home improvements we would need to be making within a short few years. And on the third visit to the home we were measuring rooms when we discovered a large number of scorpions littered the edges of the home. We found over 20 scorpions inside the house! We understand that we live in Arizona and that is part of living here, but Jake talked to everyone at his work and there were only a few who had seen more than one scorpion ever. There had to be something going on. I think if our kids were older we may have gone for it, but we decided to pull out. It really stank that we had to start all over again. But we did find a house and we are supposed to close on it by August 19th. Here is the link to this house:
http://www.longrealty.com/Listing/ListingDetail.aspx?Search=9fed9591-aa2f-42dd-ad86-c3d9809a11f9&Listing=32509847&IRPAgentID=&Image=1&First=1&Last=1&pagesize=10&SearchType=geographic&ListingDistrictTypeID=&FirstLetter=&Sort=6&Cookies=&UseColorBar=false

Jake's Birthday

Because Jake's birthday was coming up on the following week, we had a birthday party for him on the day after the fourth of July. I didn't get him a lot of presents then, because our car was packed to the max with all of the stuff we thought we'd need for the next month. There was hardly any room to spare. But I did get him pushup bars and we made him do 25 pushups for his birthday. For the last 5 he had to do them with 80 pounds of twin girls on his back! But he made it! That's my tough sexy hubby!

But to pay us back for the pushups, he started drill sargeanting everyone else who wanted to try them out. Below is my sister Hannah on the bars (she is the tough sister).
And my niece Annika gave it a shot. She actually did pretty good. She is also another one of my extremely photogenic neices. She always takes cute pics.
My sister Amber is a fabulous cake maker (for those who don't know), and she made 2 awesome cakes for Jake. One was a Butter Pecan cake, because that is his favorite ice cream, and the other was a real-honest-to-goodness cheesecake. Not the cheap crap that I always make. WE all sang to him, and AMber and Gordon got especially into it: (see below)
This is what the family thought of their singing:

We ended up leaving Saturday night around 11:00pm which actually shaved a couple of hours off of our driving time. Night driving is so much easier with kids because they are sleeping the whole time. We got in Sunday afternoon and Jake started work on Monday.

Fourth of July

After we got things going on the house we left for Utah for the fourth of July weekend. We decided to go to my mom's house because 7 of the 9 of my siblings were going to be together which doesn't happen very often. Plus we only had a few days because Jake had to be back by the following Monday. So we went up to see everyone and we had a great time. It was nice to see everyone, and it was nice for Jake to get to see my family. It had been a long time since he has seen any of my family. We stayed with my sister Amber and her family in her new house.
Angela let everyone ride her horse, which the girls loved the best. They kept asking when they would get to ride the horse. Angela is brainwashing all of her nieces to become mega-horse lovers like her. We went to a parade on the 4th of July in Kaysville and unbeknownst to us they have a tradition that at the end of the parade the whole city gets into a big waterfight with the fire department. It was funny, because we didn't notice anything unusual the whole time, until all of a sudden at the end of the parade everyone around us was wearing bathing suits and holding water guns. People had brought huge buckets and tubs full of water. I hadn't even noticed them. It was a very fun parade. The kids enjoyed it too. Mostly because almost every groups was throwing candy to kids, and they all ended up loaded.
10 of the 12 grandkids were there, and we all stayed in the same house. So things got pretty crazy. The girls had a lot of fun playing with their cousins, and have repeatedly asked to go back to play with them.
The day after the 4th we had our own waterfight/games and had a family kickball game. The water games were really fun, the kids especially liked "dribble, dribble, drench." It is like duck duck goose, but you are going around with wet sponges. Kickball didn't work out too well, because most of the kids had their own idea of how to play it.
This is just a really cute picture of my niece Abigail. All of the Thompson kids are especially photogenic it seems. I am lucky to catch my kids for a picture.