The Month of July

 We had a yard sale one weekend. The boys sold lemonade and cookies. Here they are proudly holding their hard-earned money and balloons they got from Corona Village.

 

 We got a chance to head home for the 4th of July holiday. Here's what I woke up to our first morning. No wonder we don't sleep well sometimes :)

  

At our annual Mayes 4th of July breakfast, a relative was painting faces. Sam was very excited to get Batman.

  

Charlie spent most of the week up in the mountains with his dad. They took the camper up and parked it at a campsite. They would wake up in the morning and fish all day. It was a much needed break for him. The boys went up to visit them for a day of fishing and a night in the camper.

I was having a hard time finding anything for Charlie's birthday. Technically, he already had his birthday present with the tickets to the Astros game as well as the Brad Paisley concert, but I felt bad not having anything for him on his birthday. Jacob, Sam, and I scoured the store for something cheap and not food. We finally came across these Angry Birds pencil toppers. The boys decided that Charlie absolutely had to have them.

Even though we've lived here for 4 years, we've never gone to anything with Jubilee Days. I decided to take the boys over to the carnival (Charlie had to work). Jacob had more fun that Sam. Sam was too scared to do much. Here is Jacob on the little roller coaster. He later informed me that he did not have fun on it. Sure looks like it to me.

Oddly enough, both boys had fun on the big slide. This surprised me. Sam is terrified of heights, but I guess it looked like fun. He was too small to go by himself, which was fine with me and him. We would go on one carpet, and Jacob on another, then we would race down. Sam actually froze up on the walk up there the first time. I had to pick him up and carry him most of the way.

 Sam was saying no to pretty much everything. I finally told him that if he would go on the train, then we would go on the slide again. He reluctantly agreed. He had a frown on his face and covered his ears the entire time.

One of the only other rides I could get Sam to go on was the planes. They both enjoyed it.

It was fun watching them in the House of Mirrors. They totally face-planted into the glass right after I took this picture.

There was one ride that I wanted to go on, but the boys didn't want to. Then they realized it was either that or it was time to go home because we were out of tickets. So we piled on. It was not fun. It spun around too much, too fast, even for me. They were crying and whimpering the entire time, which I really don't blame them. I wanted to get off too. And it just kept going. I finally told them that they were being so brave, we would go on the slide one more time before we left. That seemed to do the trick. So we bought a bunch more tickets and went on the slide again. I think we ended up going on it 4 or 5 times. Not cheap, but at least they had fun :)

We were able to fit swimming lessons in for both the boys. It took Sam a while to get comfortable, but he's getting there. Jacob's having a lot of fun too.

 They're not technically supposed to swim before lessons start, but we always get there early, so I let them spend the time reviewing what they've learned in lessons. Here, they're playing some sort of red light/green light game. It's at least enough to satisfy them for the 15 or so minutes before lessons start.

Sam started T-ball. He has really enjoyed it so far. But he's the littlest one on his team. He still does well. He hit every ball when it was his turn to bat, he caught a few of the balls thrown to him, and he's great at running the bases. It will be fun when games actually start.

Since Brad Paisley is our favorite country music singer, and since he was coming to Cheyenne for Frontier Days, we decided this would be the best, and possibly our only, chance to watch him live. When we got there, we realized why the tickets we bought were the cheapest we could find. We were pretty much as far away from the stage as we could get. The diagram we looked at when we bought the tickets was a little deceiving. It looked like we wouldn't be that far away from the stage. It turned out to be fine. We were right in front of one of the big screens, so we could still watch it. We figured we probably wouldn't be able to see any better unless we bought the really expensive spots in the party zone, which we couldn't afford anyway. We had a fun time.

There was a shuttle bus where we could park our car and they would take us over to the fair grounds a few minutes away. This was great for the way there, but after the concert, it seemed that just about everybody took the shuttle bus. We were probably about in the middle of the crowd in line to get on the bus. We stood in line for an hour and a half waiting to get on. We ended up getting home around 2 in the morning. Luckily, we had really late church the next morning :)