Westover Family

Nora has been working on scooting around for quite a while now, with great success. She can usually roll and spin on her belly to get where she wants to be. The last 2 or so weeks she's been working on scooting forward and getting into a crawling position. She can scoot a little then gets tired of it.
Today I brought her in the kitchen to play while I worked on lunch and the difference in the wood floor as opposed to the carpet must have been what she needed, she started army crawling a few feet at a time within 10 minutes of being in the kitchen! Yikes!!

I want to get better video of it, but this will do for now. She's definitely on the move!

 Sis and her family were here for the week of the 4th, so we got to have fun hanging out with them for a bit. The night before they left we were all together and decided to take a sisters picture. Sarah and I have one we took when Sasha was here, we should have tried to photoshop her into this one! We had to figure out the best way to stand. Of course :)
 Success, we have some sisters pictures :) Also, note my shirt. That made Andy proud, I found it on sale somewhere and thought he'd appreciate it.
 Ava loved Nora right away! :)
I love my family!!

Maybe now, after looking through the pictures again,  I'm a little embarrassed. But I'd gladly do it all again!

 We started off the morning by going to the Far West Ward pancake breakfast, our ward had one too but we've always gone to the one at Far West with our families so we opted to keep that tradition going. Maybe we should go to our ward breakfast next year...we'll see.
This year the primary parade was all about the 50 states! So each kid was assigned a state to represent. The boys had Missouri and Kansas. So Jack was sporting a Gateway Arch hat (yeah, that's homemade with a pool noodle and foil. Don't judge) and a magnifying glass (The show me state...get it?). Avery wore all things sunflower for Kansas (The sunflower state), he even had a big sunflower he had made in Kindergarten using cutouts of his hands. He had a massive sunflower on the side of his hat. They were pretty cute I think and the parade was fun for all the kids. Don't be mistaken...that's not the pied piper leading our small children away, they came back!
 Next we went to the parade here in town with Sarah and Kevin. Emma was marching with her ROTC group so we made sure to cheer her on as she marched by. Our ward's youth group also had a float in the parade, that was pretty fun to see. Luckily we parked out group next to the shaved ice table. We had a few of those during our time on the street :) We left the parade hot, sweaty, thirsty and stocked with parade candy and lame coupons :)
 That evening we headed to Sarah's house for the family gathering. Sis and Phil were in town so we had lots of fun hanging out with extra family! The kids enjoyed the pool, a failed trailer ride and running around crazy with cousins. Later in the evening Kevin got out the 4 wheeler and both boys had lots of fun taking rides on it! With the drought we're having we weren't able to do fireworks this year which was weird, but the kids had fun doing some poppers.
We hope everyone had a fun, safe, and happy Independence Day this year. We sure did!

We've started a new "job chart"/chore/slave labor/whatever you want to call it...system and so far I'm pleased with how well the boys are doing and how excited they are to help out and check off their chores.

They each have 2 cups, photo courtesy of Avery, (they are supposed to have their name and "to do" on one and "done" on the other...I need to cut that vinyl still, oops.) once they do each chore they move the stick to the "done" cup. There are certain things they do everyday- get dressed, make the bed, brush teeth, read for 15 minutes, clean room, clean up toys. And then each day they get an extra job, living room, bathroom, entry, kitchen, family room.


They have a sticker chart so each day if they do everything in their "to do"cup they get to mark a box on their chart. They'll earn prizes, money, etc when they complete a set amount of days. We're about a week in and so far so good. We'll see how long we can keep it up. 

It's nice because I've noticed that it actually is helpful to have them doing the regular cleaning. Even if they can't vacuum straight... :)