School Daze

School Daze anyone??? I LOVE LOVE this store. It is located on the westside of Oly next to Dollar tree. Both of my parents are teachers so I spent lots of time in this store as a kid. I had not been there in years because once I was old enough to stay home alone, I didn't go on such excursions. I didn't appreciate the awesomeness as much until now. I have been wanting to start some kind of preschooling fun for Laila at home and this was the perfect store to get EVERYTHING. I bought a fun calendar that comes with all the different clippings to change monthly, some cutsie pencils, pencil grips(to learn how to hold a pencil correctly..I had to use these growing up..I still don't hold it right), some tracing paper to learn to write her letters, chalk for our easel that has a chalk board on one side, a dry erase letter book(to trace with marker) and some other random odd and ends. I am excited. We have decided to get rid of our dining table(if you can call it that?) and move our bookshelf to create a special space just for the kids. I am excited!! I suppose I will post a pic soon of that. While Brad was in South Carolina he met a guy who owns an apple store and he is going to hook us up with a computer around 5o bucks just for the kids to use. He also gave us a new keyboard for half price. Our keyboard had been randomly not working. Anyway...I recommend this store and I can't wait to go back kidless!

a little late

A couple weeks ago I think I mentioned the wedding we went to in Montana. Laila was the flower girl for my cousin Aaron and his bride Melissa.  Laila did awesome when it came to walking down the aisle and sprinkling flowers. I sat in my chair, a nervous wreck, wondering if she would walk down at the right time or just plain refuse to do it. The song butterfly kisses began playing and Laila slowly walked down the stairs with her basket of petals. She began sprinkling the flowers at just the right time at the bottom of the stairs, and I never even explained how to do that. Brad and I both teared up, completely unexpectedly. I think it was a combination of the song that was playing and seeing our little girl do something all on her own and perfectly. We were so proud! :) 

The wedding was in the most beautiful location. It was pretty much in t

he middle of nowhere Montana, about a half an hour outside of Missoula at

 so

meone's house. It was peaceful and quiet and pretty much perfect. I didn't get the best pictures of Laila walking down the aisle because my card became full just as she came down the stairs. I had to quickly delete some pictures and try to snap a few of her. Also, she was not the biggest fan of the posed pictures. I am not sure we got much of a s

mile out of her for any of the professional pics. 

This is about the most expression I could get out of her
Laila is really good at ignoring people...Everyone was trying to get her to crack a smile. 
Here she comes!

My cousin Aaron(the groom) is the man you can see standing and smiling up front

She had a long day and was exhausted once we got back to the hotel. She slept in her dress and sunglasses all night. 

1st pedicure

Everyone had pedicures for the wedding..even Laila..she did great!

Quack!

We were in Bozeman , Montana most of the trip. This is where my brother goes to school right now where he is working to receive his phd in physics . The campus has this great pond where there are always a ton of ducks. They are very friendly and people feed them all the time. We gave them quite the treat with our bread. See how close they got to the kids? Don't worry..we were careful.

Vacation=over

Well we got home from our vacation to Montana yesterday afternoon. I had such a great time visiting with family and just being in my favorite places. We were busy pretty much each day and I ended up taking over 300 pictures. I am kind of sad to be home but I am already planning all the things we will do next time that we didn't get to do. I think I am just going to blog in order of events so that I don't have one really long blog.

In order to save money I packed breakfast, lunch and snacks for the trip. We left about 4 am on Sunday(july 6th) and arrived in Bozeman around 4:30 pm.

We hit one of my favorite stops along the way; the 50,000 Silver dollar bar at lunch time so we ate in the back of the van and then went and looked around the gift shop.