Catching Up

Okay, just to warn you, this is going to be a whole bunch of unrelated stuff, but I thought they were all blog worthy so I'm just going to do it all at once. Every time I sit down to put something on here, my mind goes blank and I can't remember what I was going to do. I blame it on sleep deprivation. So, random thing numero uno:

My mom brought a frog over for the kids. This is unusual because my mom is DEATHLY afraid of frogs. She is (I'm not making this up) afraid that they will jump on her face and suck her brains out. Yeah. Enough said. So she had Sara (my brand new sister-in-law) catch this frog that she found outside and she brought it in a tupperware over to my house. What am I supposed to do with a frog? I have no where to keep it! She also brought some flowers from the reception, so we decided to let the frog "sleep" in the flowers while the kids ate their lunch. Sure enough, the frog disappeared. My mom was supposed to babysit that night and I was afraid that the frog would jump on her and she'd never come over again. When we got home, she hadn't seen the frog, but Sara found it hopping around the toy room. We put him outside and haven't seen him since. Here's some pictures. I caught the kids on video tormenting my mom with the frog, but it's too big to put on here, so just imagine Nicole chasing my mom around the living room with a tiny, harmless frog in her little hand. Pretty funny, I know.

Random event numero dos:
My brother got married!!! I know, this should probably go at the beginning of the post and it certainly could have a whole post all to itself, but this is the best I can do for now. David and Sara got married July 5 in St. Louis, MO. I flew back there for the wedding when Ben and the kids were in Utah. They had a reception that night in St. Louis and then had another one here on Saturday. It was a perfect night and everything was beautiful. I took my camera to get lots of good pictures, but I only ended up taking one picture. Do you want to see it?

Yes, that's right. The dessert table. I think I had 4 or 5 slices of cake. It was so good and the pieces were quite skinny, so it was easier to justify it at the time. Anyway, we all love Sara to death and we are soooo glad she's part of the family now. Here's a picture I took of the happy couple last night. Maybe I'll get some of the wedding pictures someday and you can see how beautiful she looked in her dress. The kids love her to death, despite the "I don't care" looks on their faces here:

This leads us to...
Random event numero tres:
Ben is playing in a city league lacrosse team in Hillsboro. Yeah, if you're thinking, "wow, that's a long way to go to play lacrosse for one hour" you'd be right. But he loves it so I guess it's worth it. I went to one of his games last night (my mom kept the baby, thanks!) and he looked great! We were sitting too far away to get any good action shots of him playing (didn't want the super hard lacrosse balls to fly in our direction) but here's a shot of him just before the game started.

Yes, he's grinning like an idiot because he's so excited to play. He played in high school and college and even coached high school lacrosse in Utah. I'm glad he gets a chance to play every once in a while, but it's a very violent sport and he always gets hurt (there's blood all over the sheets from some sort of injury at last night's game) so I hope he doesn't play too much.

Finally, to finish it off...
pictures of Tori:
She's starting to "look like a real person" in the words of my brother. I thought she looked pretty cute :-)