8 years old!

My boy turned 8 years old today!!  Hard to believe it was 8 years ago that we started our family!!  Drake has been so much fun to raise, not always easy, but there's never a dull moment with "Big D!"  Here he's having his traditional birthday breakfast with the fam.  As you can see it was morning and we are all lookin alive.  Hopefully he won't kill me later for posting this pic....lookin good Drake!!  I love you buddy!

One of Drake's favorite presents was this big bag of pistachios.  Yes he is obsessed--you would think he got a big bag of chocolate or something!  Funny Kid!

\

As most of us know, Drake is obsessed with lizards --really any type of creature-- so for his birthday we gave him a leopard Gecko.  He's got quite the collection of creatures in his room-consisting of his garter snake, 3 lizards, 1 gecko, and just as of recently-a frog.  It will be very interesting to see who Drake turns out to be when he grows up.  I would be surprised if it didn't have to do with some kind of animal.

Lake Powell Family Trip

We had a great group at Lake Powell this year. The Alvarez's, Bishop's, Jones', us, and the Cartwright Family. We would have definitely ran out of food if it wasn't for Lauren. She was prepared, and was prepared for everything you can think of. She even brought all the kids a white T-shirt to decorate for the trip. They were in heaven. Austyn and Brigg even got there own little onsie. We went in the middle of May and had absolutely perfect weather for 2 days , but the last 2 days were a little scary. It was the windiest time I've been down there. We didn't sleep a wink that night because we were all up wondering if the boat was going to yank the anchors off of the rocks. The kids had a blast just tubing the whole next day, but it was even a little windy to do that some of the time. We had to find other things to do instead. As you can see, we definitely didn't worry about our looks--Charly looked like she just got out of bed, but that's the best part of the trip is not worrying about a thing--so relaxing! We ended up eating a lot and visiting and the kids had fun hunting down lizards. I think Drake caught 4 lizards by the end of the trip and managed to get 3 of them back home in a cage. He was in heaven! All in all we had a great few days in one of the most beautiful places on Earth!