Our baby is One!

You know how I roll- his birthday was almost two months ago! But it was a blast! We had a little party with our little family of four at home on his birthday, but the real bash came the next week when I went home for a visit. We had Caden's grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins over and had an awesome party.



The food was delicious! ( and adorable- thanks mom and robin!)

The toys were PLENTIFUL! Thanks everybody!

Easton keeps asking when it's going to be his birthday so he can get new toys :)

Caden can read! Haha!

But the company was the best!!! The boys had a blast seeing everyone!

We had so so so soooo much fun! Caden falls in the middle of a three-month run of birthdays in our family- me in July, Cade in August, and Jonathan in September. My birthday was awesome. We went to Seven Peaks, played all day, and went out to dinner just me and jp at night. Caden's birthday was obviously a blast, and Jonathan got to celebrate his birthday for a week straight! We had a little family party on his birthday and he chose Mac and Cheese for his birthday dinner. :) Silly boy. Then we met up with my family in St. George for conference weekend and had another little party for him. Then I threw a little surprise for him the next week and invited a bunch of our friends over. Now we have quite a wait for little E-baby to have his birthday. It's funny to explain to him that Christmas will be before his birthday, because he doesn't really understand that he's going to get presents then too!

Oh, and before I forget... Caden can walk!!! He has been walking between furniture for a month or so and just last week decided he was brave enough to let go and try walking and he's doing it! Now he never crawls and he and Easton are having a blast running around chasing each other. I love it! We're really enjoying LV and our friends here, in fact, so much that I decided to take a few days off last week and skip all the playgroups, library storytimes, and unnecessary trips to the grocery store and just play with my boys. I LOVE my boys and spending all day with them!

OBX

This summer we were able to take one of the most amazing trips I've ever been on! My brother-in-law graduated from dental school so we all flew out and took a celebration trip down to Outer Banks, NC. (Corolla, NC to be exact) I went once in high school with Ruby so I was soooo excited to go back! The awesome in-laws rented out a sweet beach house just a short walk from the beach. Here's the view from the deck. And when I say deck, I mean the top deck, because don't worry, this house was three stories and had a wrap around deck around the second and third floor, complete with hot tub on the top deck and pool in the backyard. (Can't find my pics of the house so they'll have to go on later.) Here's some fun pics from the trip.

Two of my favorite boys in the world!

Sweetest playhouse ever! I so want one in my backyard when we have a house!

The whole gang sitting on the deck on the last day. (Minus the eldest Peck's family- we missed them so much and hope they can come next time!!!)

CHECK OUT THESE WAVES! Huge! Seriously you swam out and looked UP at the wave that was about the crash onto your head and thought, "I'm gonna die!" A few times I got slammed down into the sand and actually got some scrapes from it. It was intense. One night Jonathan and I went out on a romantic moonlight boogie boarding run together and I was a little scared sometimes that we were going to get knocked out and swept out to sea. Probably one of the most fun things I've ever done.

Here are the two lovebirds that made this all possible. Thanks Grandma Kate and Grandpa Dave! We love you!

The cousins had so much fun together!

Jonathan is so obsessed with me that he wears shirts with my initials on them. Okay okay, maybe it's really lake powell, but it secretly stands for my name.

I know this pic is on here twice. Don't hate, our right-clicker's broken and I have tried every other way to delete it and can't. Just enjoy it again, it's cute enough to see twice.

The beach view.

The shore view.

Trying to make Easton like riding on the boogie board. It worked until a wave knocked him over and under the water. After that he wasn't having any more of that.

And lastly, I think my father-in-law could give David Hasselhoff a run for his money. He can dance better,too. You should have seen him at the Christmas party last year! No wonder he's the apple of Kathy's eye!

We had a BLAST and cannot wait to go again, because yes, there will be an again! Yay!

Post-less

From the looks of our blog, we've had a boring, uneventful summer. NOT SO! In fact, it's been so jammed with excitement that I haven't had a chance to update, but I am going to attempt to do an entire summer in a few days. Just thought I would let you know that we are alive and well and having so much fun we don't even have time to catch our breath! Vegas is.... growing on us. But don't think that means we're not coming back! Because we ARE! I love traveling, but I love returning "home" to our families. There's nothing better than getting to see the boys so close with their grandparents, cousins, and aunts and uncles and having them see all their fun stages. We're also big fans of Sunday dinner and the game nights that follow so we'll definitely have to return for those! But Vegas does have it's plusses:

- Amazingly, I CAN go to the park in 108* weather. All the parks down there have splashpads so you can play in the playground and when you get hot run over and cool off then run back and play some more. They are also all mostly shaded so it doesn't get too hot. Oh, and the wind always blows where we live so it keeps you cool.
- Our apartment has 2 pools and 2 hot tubs (much to Easton's delight. He could live in the hot tub.)
- Our ward is AMAZING! Seriously, I have never been in a ward before where so many people come up and meet me. My first day there they gave me a calendar with activities that they do every day and there are tons of moms with little kids that always want to do playdates so we've made many good friends already. I really can't express how much we LOVE our ward.
- Jonathan's schedule is not as bad as I thought it would be. He actually spends a good chunk of time studying at home so I see him a lot. And he always has dinner with us and kicks me out of the kitchen so he can clean up after! (Awww... love him.) We've just started so I'm prepared that it will probably get worse, but right now it's better than I anticipated so that's good!
- "Home" is not as far away as I thought. My sisters and I made it there is 5 1/2 hours, and that's with dropping Ashlee off in East Provo! So I don't feel so far away.
- They have some definite benefits that Utah lacks. H&M, Panera Bread, Cici's Pizza Buffet...
- I'm only 4 hours from the beach. Don't know how often we'll take advantage of that, but it's there.
- The sun sets at 7:30 pm right now. We've adjusted our schedules to getting up at 6 and going to bed between 9-10, with the boys going down at 6:30 for Caden and 7:30 for Easton and it is actually really really nice. We love the whole early to bed, early to rise thing. In fact, I was running errands the other day and stopped by a store and was surprised to see it was closed... till I realized it was only 7:45! Jonathan leaves early to study so that he can come home for dinner so it's been nice to have our whole family be on the same schedule of getting up early and getting to bed early, and the early sun down has definitely helped that!
- No sales tax on food! But their car registration rates alone make up for that!
- When we did the free channel add on our tv to just add the channels you pick up with the whole HD thing, we got 420 channels! Half are in spanish or fuzzy, but we get a few good ones, like food network and tlc and some movie channels. Oh, and of course we pick up 3 espn channels! Somebody must have been being a really good boy.

Anyway, it's going pretty good, but I'm still homesick. One thing I hate about Vegas is having to cover your eyes every ten seconds on the freeway. Jonathan takes a non-freeway route to school that doesn't have many dirty signs, so that's good, but I think Easton is picking up on it because the other day he showed me a picture of the green girl M&M and said, "Mom, she doesn't have any clothes on!" I could definitely do without that trash but at least where we live we are far away from it so we only see it if we go downtown. The other thing we dislike is the crime. Our GPS got stolen within 24 hours of moving there- as I was loading things in the car! So someone must have been watching and hurried out right after I took a load out and taken it! Scary, and we live in a gated community! Needless to say, we don't feel super safe so our doors and windows are locked all the time whether we're home or not and I think we're going to put another lock on our door, but people down there tell me there's really no way to completely escape the crime, but I think we're about as far as we can get from it so that's good. So I'll try over the next few days to upload all our fun activites from the summer! This amazingly hot man takes our computer with him to school everyday so it will be kind of slow, but we'll get 'er done!