Jessica had a lot of fun in Florida.
She likes the salt water, the sand and the waves.

Brooklyn and Mariah especially liked the bird show.

Alligators this close is creepy!

This was the smaller of the two the other one was 8 feet long.
Jordan and Nickie got to pet the little one its mouth was taped shut. The gator has a lot of power to close its mouth but very little power to open it up.

This is Nickie she is almost 18.
We enjoyed having her on vacation another year.
She is independent and high spirited.
Next year we will save up for the BIG FAMILY VACATION.
This one will be the biggest one ever! Scott has dreamed of going cross country..... we want to come close to that. We hope to have enough excitement planned that even our grown and moved out kids will want to come.

We will go farther west then go to the coast and down to Florida, of course.
Florida is not just a great place to vacation I came from there and have family and friends there too.

This is My sister Dawn and Trey, and a picture of most of our children.
Dawn had two sons (Chris and DJ)who are off on their own, and we are missing Josh, Heather, Jacob, and Julia.
We had a wonderful visit and enjoyed getting the kids together again.
Dawn is a year and a half younger than me, but got to be a grandma first.
DJ just had a boy the last week in July, they named him Damian. Congratulations DJ!

Joseph just turned ten.
He loves school and especially math.
He has an MP3 player and has down loaded his favorite music himself. He really likes country music. His favorites are Tim McGraw, Lonestar,
and Rascal Flatts.
He loves the computer and has even designed his own video game by going on line and getting characters and using picture back grounds.
When Scott told him he could teach him to have the characters inter act James and Joseph were totally blown away that their dad knew how to do that. That was a fun moment.
On vacation with out computer access Joseph enjoyed music and his cousins.
He said his favorite part of vacation was playing Yu-gi-oh with his cousin Adrian and tubing.

Jennifer was in heaven everywhere we went.
She was loved and spoiled by everyone.

She soaked up all the attention and took on a very outgoing personality the whole trip.

This is Jennifer with corn rows in her hair. Aunt Cimmeria leaves a beautiful trade mark on all the girls when ever she gets a chance.
In case you don't know about corn rows it is very time consuming. Cimmeria is very good and pretty fast and it still takes an average of 45 minutes to an hour and a half per child and she did all 7 girls. Haylee was too busy with the cousins.

When Haylee wasn’t playing with Ukiah she was making music.
She loved the drums and the toy guitar.

Haylee is three months older than her cousin Ukiah. The last time they were together they were little and couldn’t talk. This time they were inseparable, I think that was mostly Haylee’s doing.
She is a social butterfly and although Ukiah seemed to like her well enough he has two brothers and seemed to notice she was “different”.

The big birthday event!

James turned eight on July 25^th.

We were leaving on vacation for two weeks that day and didn’t want to wait that long to have him baptized so we arranged to have him baptized on his birthday before we left.

It was a family affair. Julia and Jordan gave the talks, and Mariah bore her testimony. Brooklyn and Joseph gave the opening and closing prayer, Alicia lead the music and Jessica played the piano. James was baptized and confirmed a member by his dad and Jennifer handed out the program.
Grandma made cinnamon rolls, they were delicious!
Nickie and I were in charge of clean up.