Cousin time continues…

We arrived home from Yellowstone just in time for some more CA cousin fun…only this time with MY brother’s family! These are just the iPhone photos from this visit…more to come from the “real” camera soonish.

We celebrated Bethany’s birthday, as well as my grandma’s birthday, after a Sunday lunch together.

All these pictures just make me smile and words can’t even begin to describe the memories and emotions that go along with them…

We went to the fair…it started off great. Don’t we all look so happy?? Well…that didn’t last past lunch. It was about the hottest day of the year. At the fair. With big, hot animals. And lots of people standing in line. We did take a break in the afternoon and I earned “Aunt/Mom of the Year” award for taking my two littles and the oldest cousin for LOTS more rides in the evening. The middle cousin didn’t like the rides, the horse show didn’t happen despite being advertised as “12:00 & 5:00 DAILY”, and we were sweating…but while I would have loved for certain things to go differently, I wouldn’t trade the memories for anything.

Elise got a blue ribbon for her art work and Becca deserved one.

We spent another hot afternoon at the park and playing in the creek!

And eating ice cream, of course!

That littlest cousin sure does love her tech toys, aka her mommy’s cell phone.

My brother spent some time going through his old things, particularly sports memorabilia, with his oldest son. Good times.

And we ate more ice cream.

Movie time at the cousin sleepover!

And to close out the visit, my brother and the littles and the cousins re-enacted the Super Bowl for us. (This was after my brother endured a reenactment of The Nutcracker by my two drama queens there.) It’s the hardest any of us laughed all summer.

My brother knows Super Bowl 2014 by heart because he has watched it 189,456 times. Apparently it just doesn’t get old. So he would tell the kids which players they were and what to do. For every single play of the game. No, I’m just kidding. Only the plays where points were scored. See my girls in the orange? They chose to be the Broncos. Don’t blame them. We don’t have cable.

All these pictures and I am not even halfway through August…it was a rather full month.