Busy, Busy!

Man, we’ve been slammed around the Simons house.  The primary thing that has kept me busy is Soul Mate Live practice.  Bellevue puts on Soul Mate 4 times a year.  It is a chance for young adults to be entertained and to hear a “sermonette” of sorts on a marriage related topic.  I was in the production this time.  Which meant a LOT of practice.  We practiced 5 nights a week for the past 3 or so weeks.  All the practice was worth it, though.  There were just under 800 people in attendance. 

The theme was “the Oscars” and they urged people to dress up.  A photo of Laura and me is below.  And no, I don’t normally wear eyeliner.  It was for the stage.

Saturday night we had Laura’s girls that she teaches in Sunday School spend the night.  They seemed to have a good time, but not nearly as good of a time as Haley.  Haley thought she was their age.  We let Haley sleep with them…well, almost.  Around midnight they were all still up and apparently Haley bumped her nose.  She started crying so from midnight on, Haley slept on the floor in our room. 

Family Portraits…AGAIN?

You guessed it!  It’s that time of year again!  Family portrait time.  It’s been a while since we took family portraits so we thought we’d take advantage of the 98 degree heat and lack of naps to take some family photos.

We took our friend Peachy along for the ride.  We figured we’d get some fantastic, wall-worthy photos.  Alas, we got a few, but that illusive “perfect family shot” got away yet again.  Maybe we’ll give it another try on a day when it is much cooler.  And, when we’ve had success getting the kids down for a nap.  At least we got a couple shots of them…right?

While we’re at it, I couldn’t resist throwing in a few pictures of Trey.  Laura and Haley went to a birthday party this past weekend and of course, I had to pull out the camera.  Trey’s been making this awful looking face where he wrinkles up his eyebrows when you tell him no.  I managed to get one shot of that (the one in the black and white below).  And yes…that is a faux-hawk.  Not only did I do it for the pictures, but I managed to give him one before we went to church on Sunday too.  The nursery workers loved it!

4th of July!

A little late, I know, but the 4th was a smashing success.  We started off the weekend with the Lakeland Kid’s Parade in our neighborhood.  It didn’t go as well as we envisioned.   Primarily because we forgot to put panties on Haley.  Does that make us bad parents?  Nah…well, maybe!?!  We didn’t realize it and neither did Haley until she got to the start of the parade and was sitting in the wagon.  We then witnessed a minor meltdown.  Honestly…I couldn’t blame her. 

So we rushed home to get her some panties and still managed to catch part of the parade.  Haley didn’t mind holding up the police escorts by stopping for a little hopscotch.  Afterwards, there was refreshments and we got a chance to get the kids’ pictures taken with the policemen.  Haley seemed to enjoy it, but Trey wanted nothing to do with it.

That evening, we invited over some friends and had a “cookout” in the cove.  I put cookout in quotes because we didn’t really cook.  A few of our friends did, but we ran to Little Caesars for a $5 hot and ready.  I know…pretty lame to celebrate the Independence of the United States with a pizza.  The Lakeland fireworks weren’t bad.  In fact, we’d have probably thought they were awesome had we not seen Bellevue’s the weekend before.

We rounded out the weekend with a visit to Tupelo to visit my grandfather and a trip to a friend’s house for dinner.  We were able to get a few fireworks shot off that night before hitting the sack and wrapping up a solid 4th of July weekend!