Trip to Billings

Just so you know I posted the pictures in backwards order, starting at the end of our trip and going on to the beginning. Also this is a LONG post. A couple of weekends ago we went to Billings to visit Reed's parents and see Ken (Reed's brother) and his 4 kids. It was really good to see them and let the kids get acquainted with their cousins (Ken and Shelly live in Ohio and we hadn't seen their kids for 2 1/2 years).

Monday: Bishop Hansen kindly invited us to go boating with his family on Monday afternoon. We had a blast!! Reed and Alan were the first ones out on the lake. Reed took Alan tubing for his first time. I wish I could say Alan enjoyed it but that would be a lie. The whole time they were being pulled behind the tube Alan was telling Reed he didn't want to get wet and he wanted to get back on the boat. When the boat stopped both Alan and Reed got dumped into the water. Alan came back up screaming and crying but he settled down once we got him in the boat. Bishop Hansen saved the day by letting Alan help steer the boat - Alan was thrilled and he talked about that the most. On the way home he told us how he helped "steer the ship".

Before we started going.

After that Reed went for a tube ride and I went skiing. It felt great to get up on skis again, although I could tell I was out of practice.

Caden, Kailyn, Alan and Jordan throwing rocks into the water.

Sunday: We went to church in the afternoon. That evening we took the kids to feed some chickens. While we were there the kids enjoyed playing on the farm equipment.

l to r: Conner, Caden, Alan, Jordan, Kailyn. Everyone sitting in the shovel of a backhoe.

Conner petting the chicken.

This picture was taken right after church, and unfortunately Kailyn was tired. We had noticed that none of the kids were the same age and we wanted to take a picture oldest to youngest.

l to r: Kailyn (5), Jordan (4), Alan (3), Caden (2), Conner (1), Chase (0, actually about 6 months).

Saturday: On Saturday morning we all headed down to the lake and went canoeing. That was a lot of fun. Then it started to get hot so we all went back home for lunch and a rest and then Grandma and Grandpa Bassett brought out their own slip and slide. Their back yard is sloped so we just laid the plastic down and put the hose at the top. They also had a wading pool and they turned some of the sprinklers on. It was a great way to keep everyone cool.

I had fun chasing the kids around. It was so nice to get to know my nieces and nephews. Below I am chasing Kailyn and Jordan.

Alan on the slip and slide

Everyone enjoying the slip and slide.

At first Alan was pretty nervous about sliding down. In the picture below I think he accidently slipped while walking down it. After watching his cousins slide down he eventually started to have fun on it.

Jordan, Kailyn, Alan and Caden, having a splash party in the pool.

Conner enjoying some spray.

Conner wasn't as excited about the slide as the big kids. He did enjoy going down on Mom and Dad's laps though.

Below is a cute picture of Kailyn reading the kids a story. She is an excellent reader and the other kids (and parents) really enjoyed having her read to them.

When the kids weren't canoeing they played a bean bag game.

Ken, Caden, Kailyn, Jordan, and Reed canoeing on the lake.

Grandpa Bassett has a dirt box on his back porch that the kids (especially the boys) loved. It has little construction trucks in it and Alan and Caden spent a lot of time out there making tracks and moving the dirt around.

As you can tell it was a fun weekend. We saw Shelly on Monday evening while we were boating and we will hopefully see more of her and the kids later in August before they have to go home.

Conner walking

Conner is officially walking! He started walking in the 2nd week of July, so he was a little more than 14 months old. It was fun to watch him learn to push himself to a standing position. The first few times he tried he ended up almost doing a somersault - he bent in half at the waist with his head on the ground looking back between his legs.

Our Independence Day

Well, we are mostly settled into our new place. Thanks again to my parents and Reed's parents and my brother, Reed, for the help in getting moved in.
We had a fun and busy 4th of July. We started the day with a ward breakfast which was yummy. Then we went home to let Conner take a short nap, then it was off to the parade. I would say the highlight of the parade was watching the helicopters go over head. They had 2 helicopters that flew over the parade route and they flew quite low. Alan loved it, but Conner started to shake and he would snuggle up close when they flew by. Some of the people in the parade handed out Popsicles, pop, and ice cream sandwiches which was nice because the parade was long and the weather was hot. Alan received a free flag and he loved waving it at all of the people in the parade. After the parade we went home and everyone took a late nap. Then we found a park and bar-b-qued our dinner there. There are some really nice parks here. We got rained out and went to Dairy Queen to have an icecream cone and wait out the storm. After that we headed home and lit off a few small fireworks with Alan. As you can see from the picture below, he really liked lighting the fireworks.
Just as we were finishing our fireworks Mother Nature decided to give everyone and show and we took cover and watched the lighning and pounding rain. The rain let off in time for us to watch the city's fireworks. We let Alan stay up and watch the city's fireworks with us, while Conner went to bed. We just took our chairs to the back of our apartment building and watched from there, rather than going down to the river. All in all it was a fun day!

Nebraska's Send Off

The night before we left Nebraska we had a huge thunderstorm. We were just going to bed and we could look out the window and see almost constant lightning and a constant rumble of thunder. A few minutes later it started to hail and it sounded like all of our windows were going to break in. The hail lasted for 10 minutes or more and they were big hail stones - about the size of a quarter or bigger.
Here is a picture out our front door...it looked like it had snowed. You almost couldn't see our grass.
The next day when we left around 1 in the afternoon there was still hail on the grass. The hail left some small dents in our vehicles and it looked like our garage was hit with a sand blaster.

The send off from our friends was much better. People in our ward invited us over for dinner for the 4 days or so before we left and we had lots of help with loading up our truck and cleaning our house. We really loved our ward and we miss them a lot.