A Royal THREE!

We celebrated Jilli's 3rd birthday yesterday. It was a fun-filled royal day for our princess. Unfortunately, Nate had an early morning meeting, so while we waited for him to come back the kids filled their time with balloon fun.

When Nate finally arrived Jilli opened her much anticipated gifts.

I think this picture is hysterical.  I'm pretty sure she's loving the fact that it's HER day.

After the present-opening Jilli had to try her hand at her new paint set, putting her lip gloss on and painting her nails with her princess polish.

I had a picture idea that I wanted to try with Jilli.  The picture was so easy to get in my mind, but proved to be quite different when dealing with an actual 3 year old.  But we tried, tried, tried

and finally got a beauty,

so we celebrated our success with a little dance and some bed jumping!

And then I took some more pictures,

and some more,

and more,

and yet some more.

I even captured dinner time.

After a trip to the school for the boys' "Meet the Teacher" and then to Jaxton's soccer practice, it was back to the house for some royal cake,

which we shared with our fabulous neighbors, Jennifer and Trey.

Happy royal birthday Princess Jilli.  You have increased the balance, gentleness, laughter and kindness in our home and how thankful we are for you.

3 year stats: 31.5 lbs and 37 3/4 inches tall

UTAH Part 3: Final Days

It's always a sad day when this little crew

and their parents have to re-pack our bags and say "goodbye" to these top-notch people.  Jilli summed the whole experience up well when we got in the car at 5:00am to start our journey home and she said, "Well, that was fun."

The only thing keeping our spirits up was the thought of making the trek back East with these equally wonderful people.

On our caravan home we stopped in Nauvoo (insert imaginary pictures, which I accidentally deleted from the camera here), stopped at our dear friends, the Kubik's, for a quick catch-up in Indiana (again, insert cute photo here with Kubik kids and Peterson kids, which was also deleted), headed to Dayton for a few days, where Nate caught up with us,

and then finally made the last leg of our travel home where we were later had the privilege of hosting Beth and her family for a couple days.

We can hardly wait til next year!

Part 2 UTAH: Petersboro Perfection

After spending two glorious weeks in Mapleton, we headed north to Petersboro.  How lucky was I to grow up in this beautiful valley?  These pictures are literally taken out my parents' front door.  Growing up I never knew how lucky I was . . .

(thanks to my sister-in-law Deanna for taking the above shots!)

My whole family celebrated togetherness time with a trip to a Bees game.  Just as we walked in our crew of kids (13 boys and 2 girls) were asked to be part of the games/entertainment in between innings.  The kids gladly accepted the challenge and after liability forms were signed the kids were off and competing.

We also celebrated Independence Day, which at this point Nate had to head home -- somebody's gotta make the money while the rest of us enjoy the summer.

We had lots and LOTS of cousin time, something my kids never tire of.

The boys also did their annual swim lessons with Mark and did a great job.  They're quite the little fish.

Merrill's Bear Lake cabin is always a big highlight of every trip.  This year we ended our time in Utah with a three night stay there.

I was also able to go on runs with my sister Michelle.  This was a beginning and ending point for us during one of our practice runs leading up to the 15k that we ran.  Such a beautiful sight!

Here we are after 4 weeks of being in Utah.  You might not be able to tell from this picture, but our stomachs all feel a little sick knowing that in the morning we have to say our "goodbye's" and face a 36 hour drive back home without dad.

I bet you can hardly wait to see how that went.  Stay tuned to Part 3 UTAH.