Party, Party, Party!

  All of the sudden, there are birthdays everywhere!! We have been celebrating birthdays like crazy, and there are even more to come! Mine, Elena's, my Mom's, Robert's and all within a few weeks of each other! First up was CJ's 2nd birthday. There was a bouncy house and these kiddos had a blast!

 Of course what would a party be without a pinata?? :) Elena made a new BFF at CJ's party, his cousin Ella - pretty sweet seeing these to precious girls having a blast together! 

The kids are really starting to get the hang of it this year! 

This little car was pretty tough though, Clyde had to step in and give CJ a hand!

CJ loaded up as much as he could! 

 What a silly boy!

It's amazing how fast all these babies are growing! I remember when Elena was the only baby around (that didn't last long though!)

 Cake time and then presents!

 

Elena loved playing with baby Sofia~

She crashed hard when we hit the road after the party. But she made sure to hang on to those party balloons! Lol!

But wait! That's not all for the day! Next we were on to surprise my friend Kristy for her 30th birthday! Fun times!

                                      

                           

 Elena had a blast "decorating" for the party! :)

This past weekend was Estela's 1st birthday party Celebration! Miss Elena is starting to get very excited about "dressing up" and going to parties! :) I'm loving it! By the way, can someone tell me where my little baby went????

This time she even picked an outfit to match her turquoise toes! 

More bouncy house and pinata fun of course!! 

                             

                             

                             

                                                                                 

                             

Then it was time for the adorable birthday girl to have some of her adorable Minnie cake! 

                             

What a sweet birthday girl!! :)

 Whew!! And that was just the end of August birthdays!! But we had a blast celebrating with everyone! 

Flight Festival.

Two weekends ago - yup, I am still that far behind...we went to the flight festival here in town. We had never taken Elena to anything like this before so we decided to give it a try, especially since she thinks planes are pretty awesome (although she does think they all go to California! - ha!) First we checked out some smaller planes. It was pretty hard to make her leave this toy model!

Then we explored this awesome Army helicopter!

Elena loved pretending to fly it! :)

Then we moved on to some bigger planes~



And finally time for the airshow!


Elena was not too excited after about the first 10 minutes of it. But my Mom and I were loving it and would have loved to stay longer! One real crowd pleaser was this semi-truck~

It looks normal until you realize there is a jet engine on the back of it!!! Crazy! How can anyone drive a truck that is going 200+ miles per hour!!!??? Let's just say I'm glad were weren't right up at the fence!


Another thing about the truck, it was cool, but it was LOUD! I mean ear-deafeningly loud! Yikes - after that we decided to head out and go get some lunch!

On the way out we still had a great view of some other acts and this duo was amazing - they did some unbelievable tricks! Maybe Elena will be up for staying longer next year! We will just have to wait and see!

Ribbit, Ribbit.

I know, I know...why am I back already?? Well let me just say that of course, after I called myself out on my clumsiness to all of you, the computer took no time to fix! I have to give a huge shout out to Ribbit Computers who not only returned my laptop in working order, but managed to do it in less than 24 hours!! Pretty impressive!! So if you ever have any computer issues I highly recommend them! Since we are kinda talking about frogs... my Mom and I took Elena to a education class at the zoo a couple weeks ago - and the topic just happened to be frogs! We decided to get to the zoo early to ride the train and check out the gorillas.

Then it was class time. The zoo does a class once a month on a different animal so we decided to try this month out. There was story time, and then lots of learning about frogs!

The kiddos even got to catch paper flies with their frog's tongues and pretend to be frogs hopping around the room. Elena thought it was pretty fun!

Then they brought out real frogs for the kids to see.


It was a pretty cool little class and we are going to do the pig one next month! :) Here is my silly girl pretending to give us a show on the way out of the building.

Cracked.

I think I have mentioned in the past that I am slightly clumsy, well yesterday I really proved that fact by dropping my laptop! I have no idea what happened, it literally just slipped out of my hands! The screen totally cracked and is now out of commission until it gets replaced. :( I am so bummed and mad at myself!!! So I will be missing for a little while but I will have lots to catch up on when I return. Thought I would let you know so you weren't worried about me. ;) By the way this is my 400th blog post! How crazy is that? I had hoped for a much funner topic for this particular post but that's not how it worked out this time. Oh well, I guess that's how life goes sometimes. If you are wondering how I did this post, it is coming from my nook color and has taken for-ev-er to type so I definitely won't be blogging from it again! Hopefully I will have my computer back sooner than later!! See you then!

Hall Family Reunion 2011 - part 2.

Though Branson was an amazing place to have a reunion, one bad thing was that there was just so much to do and all the family was usually going in different directions! But we all got together Saturday evening to hang out and have dinner. My cousin Katie planned the entire reunion this year and did an amazing job! Not only that she also cooked dinner for everyone! 60 people total - and it was delicious!!


After dinner we headed outside to take our group pictures. Elena had a blast running around and it was a little chaotic with so many family members trying to get organized! Hopefully I can post the big group photo that we took when I get a copy of it.

Here are all the 1st cousins - immediate descendants of the Hall brothers and sisters - where this whole reunion started in the first place.

I didn't get too many individual families pictures since I was chasing after E, but here are a couple~



Our group is always one of the smaller ones every year. :) That's ok though, we are used to it. It was definitely bittersweet to be at the reunion without my Aunt Marge - but we had some great times reminiscing about her this weekend, which was very nice.


Then we played some games~

Looked at old photo albums~

and had ice cream sundaes. I let Elena have a squirt of whipped cream in her mouth - she thought this was great! ;)

Elena particularly enjoying playing with her cousin Savannah who is 14 months old. They were too cute together!

Here is a picture of Savannah's mom Lauren, Elena and I. Funny thing about Lauren and I - we are only a couple years apart in age and only got to see each other at reunions as we were growing up, yet we have so many similarities, besides being tall and blonde, we both ended up playing softball in college, we played the same position (pitcher), and both had a huge interest in Architecture as we were growing up. Kinda strange! Now she designs toys in Colorado - how cool would that job be??!!

Finally Sunday rolled around and it was time to leave the cabin (at least there were no more bat sightings!).

As we were driving home, Elena talked my Mom into letting her play with my camera. Which actually turned out to be pretty hilarious with what came out of her taking pictures ~

About 5 hours later we finally made it home!! Whew, what a fun, family-filled weekend! We had a blast and can't wait for the next one!