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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!