The 4th, diving practice, and misc.

Happy 4th of July!!! I love this time of year, mostly because I get to be with my whole family and have a party. But this year, since we are 2000 miles away, we had to make do on our own.

We joined a pool for the summer. They were open on the 4th and since it is in the 100's here (not to mention humid- disgusting) we went for a few hours during the heat of the day. Here Lohn is playing greasy watermelon football.

 And here are the kids doing a watermelon eating contest. They said no hands. Silly Sylas.

I'm pretty sure this is the same watermelon they played greasy football with.

 That morning we went to the parade. 

 My kids liked the candy the most. My favorite was the bagpipes.

 Then we went to the fireworks. There are several places that shoot fireworks here, and a family in the ward invited us to go to their community fireworks with them.

 See? We have friends now. Yippee!

In addition to joining the pool for the summer, we also put the kids on Swim team and Dive team. Totally worth the money. Here's a few dives for your pleasure.  (Keep in mind, they could do nothing of the sort when I put them in.)

 And Gunnar figured out how to swim on his own. This only happened with much bribing though. He's scared of the deep end, even though he does great. We got him to jump off the diving board too, with the promise of 5 suckers. We even got Sylas to jump into the pool from the side. I didn't get a video of that though.

 We started home school for the summer.  It's going pretty well. It takes about 2 hours a day, half of that is reading their books. The library and Barnes and Noble have reading programs for the kids, so they have plenty of incentives.

 Ander took this of himself on the way home from swimming. Haircuts are happening tonight.

 Our little pet. I finally held it so they would stop pestering me. And because I think it made Tamsyn feel bad I wanted nothing to do with her. I saw Lilly last night with a bit of mouse tail hanging out of her mouth with a big bulge in her belly. It gave me nightmares all night.