Cousins, friends, and siblings

Cousins that work together stay together

Liam, (Ellie), and Taryn

Floating down the "river"

Swinging at the water hole

A fun swimming date with these 2 Brownies

Corby sometimes likes to beautify his little sister

Reed giving Corby a piggyback ride because he got tired of walking. :)

Big Springs Hike

I absolutely love this hike!  It is easy enough for our littlest kids (MJ can walk the whole thing), but it's also pretty enough to make it worth it.  The kids did pretty well hiking but the real fun happened afterwards.

Where's Corby?

Taryn and Lincoln gathering "bamboo"

When the kids were acting "bored," Cassie came up with a couple of simple games to get the excited and playing again.

 Which turned into exploring this little area for the next couple hours...

Seriously, I'm not sure who was more giddy about this-me or the kids.  This is my dream come true.  Can we please live here?

A dirty baby is a happy baby.

And just as we were leaving, we spotted a tiny snake!  So we jumped out of the van and I grabbed it real quick before it escaped.  [Some of them] were super excited about holding it.

Work mules

I thought these 2 littles needed to start pulling their weight around here.....

Cousins!

If you asked my kids their favorite part of summer (or any holiday for that matter), they would say getting together with cousins.  We are fortunate to have a lot of cousins that live nearby, but with Allie's family in town from Colorado, we made sure to get together even more.  

Hiking:

Of course Grandma is a favorite too

 Playdates at our house:

(Taryn and Lincoln are the cutest little buddies)

 Farm Country:

(unprompted Taryn-Link snuggle) :)

4th of July

We hosted another big, 4th of July bash with both sides of our families (my sister, Allie, was in town with her family too).  We started festivities around 5 for a BBQ and other activities followed.

Braby side cousins

The mixing of cousins actually went wonderfully, at least for this group.  It turns out that if you're between the ages of 5 and 8, you're already part of the club.

More cousin mixing

This face of MJ's cracks me up!  Apparently fireworks took her by surprise.

We had a couple of neighbor friends come down when we started lighting off fireworks.

Glowsticks are always a hit

My favorite 4th of July picture ever.  Love these brothers.

Another favorite tradition is a bike parade around the culdesac.  We play patriotic music and the kids ride bikes or scooters.  This tradition goes way back to my childhood when we would go to the Burkharts every year on the 4th of July and they would do a bike parade in their driveway.  They even had an awesome pull wagon that fit several adults that we paraded around.

Maui: Random

During our stay, we ate some amazing food (hello, fish tacos), went to a fun magic show, went on some scenic drives, played in the waves and body surfed (and got our butts thrashed), played with a fun bouncy ball toy on the water, and ate more good food.

While we were living it up in Hawaii....

The kids were having fun with cousins....

(we can't thank my mom and Kevin's sister enough for watching our kids while we were away).  They had a great time but they missed us more than I thought they would (especially Taryn).  She had a couple rough and teary nights.