emgup

Monday, July 27, 2015

House Hunting...Again

I flew out to California...again....to look at some houses. We looked at some new builds and some resales. We found one house we really liked...just about perfect. But we decided it was too small. Here we are having lunch at In & Out. Yum!

Emma with my drink

One of the model homes we looked in. I liked the super hero girl room.

This was with a builder we liked and are hoping to get a homesite from them.

One morning we took a walk/hike in San Francisco before looking at houses.

Beautiful views

Another model home.

An Emma room. So we came up empty this weekend too.

Still looking, but it was good to see Scott.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

4th of July

We had some fun family time this 4th of July weekend with my parents and Scott's family. Scott flew in for the weekend from California and Scott's family was in town for a family reunion so we got to see them. Here are Anna and cousin Olivia at Thanksgiving Point. They had fun playing together.

Grant

John and Owen. It looks like John is mad at Owen but he was just mad in general.

There he's feeling better

Matthew gets fed to the shark. Live every week like its Shark Week.

We had a nice dinner at a park in Provo on the 3rd of July

Here are the original Guptills

and Guptill "kids"...my how big those kids are

John and his cousin, Owen, who were born within a few weeks of each other, had fun playing together. They were trying to throw grass on each other.

Funny boys

Love them! Thanks for the photo, Alycia!!

On 4th of July we headed down to Provo and had lunch with Scott's family. And we had to get shaved ice before we headed down.

I love shaved ice!

John got his first

After sno-cones we had a fun lunch and went swimming in Provo. I didn't take any pictures, but we had a great time!

Later in the evening we headed back to Lehi and had dinner with my family, including red, white and blue skewers.

Later we set off a bunch of fireworks. And our neighbors set off a ton. There were fireworks going off everywhere!! It was so fun. It reminded me of when we were kids and fireworks were still legal in our hometown.

Hooray 4th of July!!

Summer Activities

Here are some pictures from our summer activities in Utah. The kids took swim lessons at the Lehi Legacy Center for two weeks. They LOVED it! The swimming center there is lots of fun and they got plenty of swimming time. They were always sorry to leave. John and I took a Mommy and Me class and my mom watched Emma.

Emma learned to sit up since we've been out of the house, which is great!

Here is John reading her a story.

Emma really likes her baby food. Anna often volunteers to feed her. Emma just can't get enough.

We made marshmallow and toothpick structures a few times. Matthew made a pyramid.

Anna always wants to wear matching clothes with me and do my hair.

John is not always getting his regular naps since we are out and about a lot.

Here he is collapsed on the couch.

Anna made these felt owls for her and Emma (from a craft kit from Michael's)

Emma can't really play with it yet. She might destroy it and eat it.

Playing with water a lot outside

Talking with Emma

Emma likes water and baths now. She is so cute!

These three took a bath together in the tub. They were having a great time but the whole thing ended abruptly when John threw up in the tub. Ew.

Traveling and all the changes has seemed to make Emma's separation anxiety even stronger.

She cries a lot when not being held by mom. Poor Emma!

My mom made some invisibility cloaks for some people.

They loved them.

Our stick jars - this is our newish reward system.

Each kid has a jar and they earn small popsicle sticks (half size so they fit in the jar) when they do good things. They get them for putting on clothes without being asked or doing a helpful job for mom, doing workbook pages, 20 minutes of reading or jobs etc. They get sticks taken away for breaking family rules, disobeying, being rude etc. They can exchange sticks for screen time or sweets. At first it worked great, but then I ran into a problem. They would spend their sticks as soon as they earned them so they couldn't have them taken away later for being bad. So we had to introduce negative numbers. If they have no sticks and do something bad/negative they get a small black rock. If they have a black rock in their jar (a minus) they aren't allowed to have any sweets/dessert/popsicles or screen time until they earn it out with jobs. It's been working really well. I left the jars in Utah when we traveled to Oregon, so I've just had to keep track in my head.