Ballet party

This past weekend Megan was invited to her best pal's ballet birthday party.  This was the first time Megan was exposed to a semi real ballet class.   She did her best and loved every minute of it. She was the only one there that had never been to ballet class before.

A ballet craft

Megan with her best friend, Autumn.

These were the best tasting cupcakes ever...with the retro ballerinas

Ballerinas going to the class

my prima ballerina and her other best friend Casey

trying her best

looks pretty good here

fluttering around

1st day of 1st grade

Now that Ian is in his 3rd week of 1st grade, I guess I had better get going on this post before I forget about it completely. 
This year was completely different from last year. 1. no tears from mommy 2. he was going to be gone ALL day. 3. we both already knew people from last year 4. he was going to eat lunch at school. 5. he lines up in the back of the school with the other big kids.
He wasn't even phased, except for that he asked if he had school every day, or just one or two days a week and that he wanted to know if he had Open Gym like during summer vacation.
His daddy had to go to work early that day, so he couldn't walk him to school, or at least we all thought, until he drove up just as we were getting shoes on to get out the door.  :)

Traditional 1st day of school pose

Someone had to have her picture taken too

walking off to the 1st day

boy with his daddy

he was super excited to be at school, we were rather early

some serious talking going on

one last look back at mommy

ready, set, LEARN

Ziggy's accident

Whew, got all caught up with summer posts, I do have a ton of miscellaneous photos that didn't make the posts, I might just have to have a mishmash of those. But for now, this post is about my cat Ziggy.
This all happened around 4 wks ago.  After Paul had gotten home, we decided to take the kids to our local Rec center and have them practice swimming. I think one of the  kids let the cat out, not normally a big deal.  We were gone maybe an hour when we got home and he was there at our front door waiting for us. Again, not a big deal, he normally does that, especially on hot days.  But as we were getting in, there was a rather lengthy phone message from our neighbor explaining that her cat "Cat" ( I know original name) and Ziggy got into a big fight and that her cat was pretty scraped up and for us to check out Zig.  I had gone upstairs to change and Paul yelled at me for me to check out Ziggy.  I came down to get him and noticed the fur was just flying off, he was limping, and somewhere he was bleeding (as evidence of the blood on my white shirt)
He wasn't in the mood for me to check him out, so he went to the basement to rest.  He didn't even come up in the middle of the night to bite my nose like every other night.
I checked on him, he was pretty beat up, and wouldn't walk and still limped.  So off to the vets we went.... a complete check up, x-rays, antibiotics and $400 later, he was diagnosed with a ripped back claw on his right side (ergo the blood) and a broken toe. So he came home with a back paw wrapped up, front leg splinted up and a lovely cone of shame.
It took him a while to learn how to get around, he is nearly done with his treatment.  We have had to go in every week or so for splint changes. a few sores have arose due to the splinting, but those are healing. I have actually re-splinted him myself, not wanting to go in and have them charge me an arm and a leg for that.
He is so ready to go back to normal...but for now he is Mr Gimpy, but don't let that fool you, he uses that splint like a lethal weapon. And for kicks they change up the colors of his splint, first it was blue, then red, then purple and now he is sporting a neon green.

a little drugged up, he was on morphine 2 times a day

after he got his splint change and I took off his back one.

Nana's visit

Like I said in the previous post, we had brought Paul's mom to our house so she could spend some quality time with the kids.  The last time we saw her was when she came out in Feb, before her cancer was even diagnosed. Now she is on the road to recovery and we wanted her to come.
She stayed a week, despite not being able to do "touristy" things with her, (the kids wanted to be just home and Paul had no more vacation time left) we did have some fun. We had her with us during 4th of July, we took some walks to the duck pond, our good friends even invited us to the Denver Botanic Gardens, and she even got to be here when Ian lost his 2nd tooth.

having fun with the bubble blowers daddy got at Disneyland

what?!? that's not how they are supposed to be used?

officially too cheap to buy a pool...let's water the grass and you can cool off too

go ahead jump

Megan was a little too intimidated to go through it

missing tooth #2, look I can put my tongue in the hole.

not to be out done by brother

Nana with the kids

Ian and his best pal Teddy

still very girly

the 3 kids

summer vacation part 5-going home

I do have to mention, after complaining about the high cost of Legoland, we did get one hotel night free, from using our reward night from Priority Club rewards, so we did hit a bargain with that, and just so happened that we hit "kids eat free" at Denny's. (the kids love to eat there, who doesn't love to eat chocolate pancakes for dinner?)
The next day we headed east towards Arizona to spend a night or 2 at Paul's mom's house and to pick her up to bring her back to our house for a visit.
The drive wasn't too bad, we did stop off to visit a military museum...and that was also FREE, just so happened that Wednesdays were free, HOOH AH!!!
The heat in Arizona was pretty much a downer, but that does not kill us, will make us cranky, whiny and appreciate AC, right?
We did get to see our nephew work at In and Out burger. Yummy!!!  We also celebrated my sister-in-laws birthday (early) The kids enjoyed the (nearly) unlimited pool time at Nana's house.
Then after a few days visiting, and doing laundry we headed back to Colorado.  Making a stop to see the, wigwam hotels, and petrified forest. 
Our plans were to spend the night in New Mexico....Albuquerque, but as it turned out, there were no vacancies, so we had to head about an hour to Santa Fe.   Oh well, thank God for my AAA book and a cell phone. After spending one night...a few hours later we were HOME!!!

Wigwam motel

they even had old timey cars parked in front of each- totally like the Cozy Cone in Cars

Maybe we could stay here....maybe not

they out done them selves with the decor

really, I didn't see much to them, just hard trees, rocks really

yep, that's a petrified tree trunk

it was super SUPER hot outside

just not sure of what Paul was taking a picture of here

supposedly the largest specimen of petrified tree.

Seriously, it was so hot I would petrify too.