1st Birthday Party and Swimming Lessons

Last Sunday we did indeed celebrate Rebekah's 1st Birthday. It was a low key afternoon with the family over for a BBQ lunch and birthday cake. As usual for a 1 year old, I'm not sure she really understood what was going on, but she did seem to enjoy the cake! Here she is offering to share some with daddy who is taking the picture.


She is on the verge of walking and is getting more and more daring. She will take 3 or 4 steps before falling down, but now instead of just crawling to her destination she will stand up and try again. I'm sure in a few weeks time she will be running to keep up with her brothers and sister.

In other news, the older kids have been going to swimming lessons at the pool down the street from our house for the past two weeks. They are free to us because the school district pays for all the kids to receive one free lesson during the summer. This is Naomi's first attempt at swimming lessons and she seemed to do well. The first day she wasn't so sure about getting in the water and by the end she was blowing bubbles and "talking" to the "fishes".


Josiah and Joshua were in the next level up and were working on their front and back floats as well as learning some swimming strokes. I'm not sure I'll take them in the pool without water wings just yet, but they have definitely gotten more confident in the water. Here is Josiah "swimming" on his stomach.




And here is Josh "swimming" on his back.

Joel's Birthday is tomorrow and we are having a big family gathering at his grandparent's house on Sunday. (Yes we have a lot of summer birthdays in our family!) It's been warm in Denver the past few weeks and I'm hoping that August is unseasonably cooler. (especially being 8 months pregnant!)

Dallas, Fireworks, First Birthdays and a Lost Tooth

So, as you can see by the title it's been a busy couple of weeks. I won't be very long winded in this post, but I'll put up quite a few pictures so you can "see" how our last few weeks have been spent. I created a slide show of some of our Dallas highlights, we did a lot in the 11 days we were there, just trying to keep 8 kids busy. Ignore the dates on the pictures, my camera got set to the wrong date.

The kids enjoying the fireworks in Arvada on the 4th of July

My big one year old. Her birthday was Monday the 7th, and we're having a party this coming Sunday (messy cake smearing pictures to come!)


On Wednesday night Josiah lost his first tooth during dinner. It had been REALLY loose for about 24 hours and it finally fell out. (We were eating spaghetti at the time, it wasn't really a bloody mess.)

Joel is home from Virginia. We all survived the month apart. We all met on our drive home in Wichita and we were back in Denver on Thursday the 3rd. We had a nice 3 day weekend and Monday he started working. All in all June was a very full month for us and I'm looking forward to a slower July!