Visitors

A month after Adelyn was born Jaron had to spend four weeks in Boise doing a rotation.  My sister Cassy was awesome and made the trip down to help me out.  

She always absolutely spoils my kids when she's around.  I am so, so grateful when our kids' extended family is willing to take the time to be important to my kids.

  I hardly got any pictures of Cassy's visit, I think because I'm terrible at taking pictures when people visit but also because whenever she was doing something fun with the kids, I wasn't with her.  It was SO nice to have a few hours' break now and again.

Cassy bought Adelyn this cute little "heart breaker" onesie for Valentine's Day.  Obviously, Adelyn is thrilled about it.

 Cassy instigated a mean little Nerf war one night.  The kids think she's a pretty fun aunt.

 Reed.  Hahaha.

Then a few weeks later Genny brought her four girls to visit.  I vowed to be better at taking pictures and I may have gone overboard!  All these were taken with my phone, though, so they're not stellar quality.

As you can imagine, doing anything with nine kids age 8 and under is NUTS.  Especially in a 1600 sq ft house like ours is. So much fun and so much craziness!  We pretty much slept people anywhere there was open floor space.

Here's bedtime books.  Reed is seriously half the craziness by himself.

 Yikes!  Do we REALLY have this many kids?!? Wowsers.

 We hit up a bouncy house place - so, so fun.  We killed three hours here easily.

Red-faced cuties.

 Brinley was my little baker helper.  She is the cutest, sassiest girl around.  It's a good thing she's not my daughter.  I wouldn't be able to say no to anything because of all her cuteness.  And she looks SO much like her mom did when she was little.

While they were here Alden had a "superhero" cake contest for his scout banquet. Genny and Jaron and I whipped up this "fortress of solitude" beauty one night. (And Alden won the contest!  He won a gigantic kilogram bag of gummy worms 'cause who wouldn't want one of those?!)

 We hit the falls one day and were totally blessed by this awesome rainbow.

 We hit up a sweet little museum.

 And, yes, sometimes we just turned on the TV to have a breather.  Nine kids is so fun but so much noise and mess!

 Genny seriously has the prettiest girls ever.  

Little 10 month Whitney is no exception.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three girlies in a tub!

And we had to snap a picture of this moment.  

Because who wouldn't want to remember they looked like this?

 We turned Genny blonde while she was here.

She signed me up for Instagram and encouraged me to break my anti-selfie rule.

She's such a bad influence.

 We just love it when our family comes to visit!!