Fun weekend!

Wow! I feel like we are trying to pack our last few weeks of summer as full as we possibly can! I keep thinking of fun things we should do and places we should go but then there's that money and time thing that keeps coming up. This week and weekend was good though. Amy came down for a few days of F-U-N! It was so great.

For those of you who don't know me well, I am such a small town girl at heart. I am close to my friends that I have known forever, and love more than anything to hang out with my sisters. Surprisingly, in every town I have lived (Monterey, CA Augusta, GA, Puyallup, WA) there was someone else from little old Star Valley, Wyoming. Once in Mark's first day of class at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA everyone was introducing themselves. A guy named Jay Haderlie introduced himself. He told the class he was from Star Valley, WY and Mark said, "My wife is from there." Jay replied, "Oh, you must be Mark."
Mark, being from a big city, almost fell out of his chair in shock! How did this guy know who he was? He hadn't even introduced himself. :) Turns out my aunt Ronda visit taught Jay's mom and had mentioned that her niece and her husband were moving to Monterey to go to DLI. It was funny! He's used to the fact that I am a small town girl at heart and loves me anyway and tolerates my many family functions. I also love him in spite of his stupid inbreeder jokes! I would love to live closer to my family but it would be hard to give up the 24 hour stores and restaurants. My grandma can't believe I can go to Walmart any old time. She lives 20 miles from the closest little town.

To make a short story long, it was great to have Amy down here. I am completely myself around my sisters and while that's scary, we have a great time. We did some school shopping, took the kids swimming, ate yummy food, and lived at the snow zone shaved ice shack! Her Kadon is such a kick. He talks as well as Zachy and he is just a year! (Zachy has been funny the last few days, waving to any and all that look at him) Amy's kids have always talked early. It's not like they have any examples of chattiness in their parents. ;)

Fri night Mark watched "The Last Mimzy" with the kids.They really enjoyed it. I tried but Zachy was a bear. They enjoyed that and last night he took them to a Chukars baseball game. It was Qwest night and they had a blast trying to catch a fly ball and eating giant corn dogs! I'm glad they got to hang out. I know this post is getting long and snooze-worthy but I still have things to say. :)

I am so excited about our yard. We got a sprinkler system in the back a few weeks ago and things are greening up! When we moved in two years ago, we were told the back yard had been planted. It's a big sucker for a city yard. I dutifully watered it the first year and it turned into a HUGE weed patch. We thought they had lied about planting. Fast forward to this summer. I killed all the weeds a month ago and now grass is showing up in several places. Our sprinkler guy seems to think they planted, but not very well. That leads me to my question. Does anyone have any advice on planting themselves? What kind of seed is good? We talked about hydroseeding but my sis Amy says we should save the money and seed it ourselves. Any advice from the blogosphere? We worked in the yard for several hours yesterday until we about keeled over from heat stroke!

I have been super wordy. Today has been a great day. We enjoyed church this morning, Zachy took a LONG nap this afternoon. (he had several days to make up for!) It was a nice, but HOT day! I am ready to fall into bed. Goodnight!!!

PS-There is an awesome deal going on at Walgreen's this week- LOTS of freebies! I'll post more tomorrow!