Emily's 3rd Birthday!!!

We had such a fun birthday party for Emily. We spent the week at my parents in Arkansas and also celebrated it with Joel's family. I LOVE this little girly girl of mine!!!

Here's her Elsa cake. I also made a dress cupcake cake last year for her. It's been my favorite to make because it's so easy.

 Oh so serious during the singing. If you know anything about this sweet girl of mine...you know she doesn't prefer for ALL the attention to be on her!!

She LOVED opening her presents. She was oh so delicate and quite slow about it. But she loved it!

And of course...she loved her cupcake! I love these pics!

Helping Daddy put her scooter together....that she calls her "bike".

I can't believe this sweet little girl of mine is already 3 years old!! Love her to pieces...and our little family would be so incomplete without her fun, sweet, sensitive personality in it.

My new car!!!

My car died!! But the good news is that I got a new one!!!

We'd been thinking about getting a new car since we are expecting #3. My old car won't fit 3 car seats. But we finally decided to try to make it work and get more narrow car seats. And then my car died....so much for that idea!!

We were on our way to get my sister from the airport...she was coming for the weekend!! We were almost to the airport and Patrick noticed that the steering wheel was shaking pretty badly.  So we stopped and he checked it out. The radiator fan was loose and gave the radiator a little crack. He thought he could fix it when we got home.  We barely made it home. The fan just tore up the radiator...and would just dump the radiator fluid. When we were almost home, he had to stop almost every block to refill the radiator with water so it wouldn't overheat the car. It was awful. 

We are planning on driving to Arkansas in 5 days!!

So on the way home...we were thinking about maybe we should look at new cars. Miriam offered to watch the kids while we headed to the dealership.

Everything worked out perfectly! I really do feel like this was a "meant to be" moment. It would've been awful if this happened to us on our trip to Arkansas. My old car model was known to lose its transmission around my mileage...and we could tell it was starting to get problems. So even though Patrick could've replaced the radiator...we didn't want to pour tons of money into that car anymore. We were really grateful that Patrick's parents could get us the friends/family employee discount!!!

And I LOVE my new car!!!

July 4th Weekend

We had a fun July 4th weekend!! Friday we all hung out together as a family...fishing...botanical gardens...we found a nice walking path...and let's not forget chick-fil-a for dinner!

Saturday...we went walking again. We hung out with some good friends and some good food. And then we went  and watched fireworks with them and other members in the ward. It was such a nice fun afternoon/evening.

Here is my attempt at getting a pic of my 2 kiddos in their 4th of July get up. Why won't they both cooperate at the same time?!?