[Who Needs Toys??]

Does it get any cuter???

YIKES

THIS...is what we found in our backyard this morning!!

A diamondback rattlesnake!!

OH MY GOODNESS!

So Kevin took matters into his own hands and single-handedly outwitted, outsmarted, out-sized that snake! Man, now his head is in Tupperware...he should NOT have messed with the Mortensons!!

Now let's just hope its mommy and daddy don't come looking for it!!! :-)

Oh What Do YOU Do In The Summertime?

WE...

Alexa took swim lessons and has become quite the little fish in the water!

She has absolutely NO fear and just loves going to the pool...which we do just about every day!

What a cute little bathing beauty!

Our backyard, when it isn't too hot, is a fun little playground.

And now that it's started raining, we love to dance in the rain!

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So many fun things to do...we LOVE the summer!!

~Happy 4th of July~

We celebrated this year's 4th of July with Kevin's brother's family. It's so nice having family close by to celebrate holidays with!

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And here's my famous cake! It's not the 4th of July unless I make this cake!

This is how Alexa finished off her Independence Day...by running through the sprinklers in our back yard! Do you think she had a good time???? :-)

Happy 4th of July!

{Sisters & Friends}

I'm so glad my two little ladies love each other! They definitely have their moments, as most siblings do, but on a whole...they get along so well and I'm loving how they're starting to really play together now.

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(Don't you love how I do Payton's hair??!!! :-))

..::To Gramma's House We Go::..

We ventured to Elfrida this week to visit Kevin's parents. We hadn't been back to Elfrida since December 2007, when Alexa was 13 months old. This is partly due to the fact that we were in Kentucky for dental school...but also because Kevin's parents were gone for 18 months serving a mission for our Church (they just got back in March). So we figured it was high time to pay a visit. And we had a blast! The girls LOVED being around gramma and papa and Kevin and I LOVED having a brief reprieve from constantly entertaining the girls! We should seriously hire a live-in nanny!! ;-)

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Anyways, as soon as we got there, Alexa was rarin' to go. She didn't want to put off the fun things one bit. So we started off with jumping through the water on the trampoline. As you can see....it was a HUGE hit!

There was a lot of Gramma/Alexa time to be had....games, stories....

....dress up (they were playing "church" here)...

...and more dress up!!

The second day we were there, we headed up to some old ghost towns before it got too hot. It was fun to see the old buildings. Alexa thought that there were actually going to be ghosts of the cowboys who used to live there in them....it took a bit of explaining to convince her otherwise!!

This next picture makes me laugh....Alexa looks like she's just about had enough of life and Payton looks like she's ready to conquer the world!! :-)

Then we went to Kevin's Uncle Gary's farm to see the horses. Alexa has been wanting to ride a horse forever. So here she is checking things out...once she got up close, she wasn't so sure!

But as soon as Uncle Gary told her that her cousins would come and ride the horses, she found the courage to saddle up!

And, of course, Payton had to do everything her big sister does! There's no leaving her out!

Me and my sweet Payton at the farm.

Kevin and the girls checkin' out the cows.

What good is a trip to the farm if you can't ride an old tractor???

Or climb in the bales of hay???

We finished off this action-packed day with a wiener roast in gramma and papa's backyard. Lucky for us, we picked the very brief period of the day when the wind decided to blow the hardest!! Our picnic outside didn't last very long!! But it was still fun and yummy!

And for dessert, we had s'mores...you can see the evidence still on Alexa's face! They sure were delicious!

These are the sunsets from gramma and papa's backyard.

On our way back to Tucson, we stopped by Kevin's Grandparents house, Gramma and Grampa Brown. They had never met Payton before so it was fun to visit with them.

We had such a fun visit and look forward to many more fun times with "mamaw" and "bampaw" as Payton now says! Thanks for letting us come visit!!

:::Outside Looking In:::

This is what Kevin sees just about every time he heads outside to do something in the backyard!

Speaking of our backyard...there's a rite of passage to owning a new home - the FIRST lawn mowing!! This is doubly exciting for us since we laid sod the first week we moved in and we thought it had bit the dust...but it came back, quite beautifully, and now we (by we, I mean Kevin) get to mow it at least once a week!! :-)