We had a fun busy week of friends and water! On Thursday, me and the boys headed up to Cunningham Falls Lake in Maryland with some church moms and kids. A real hot, humid day and of course McKay and Easton wanted to spend the first hour playing in the sand - UGH!!! On top of that, it seems rather routine for Easton to spend the first hour we're somewhere in melt down mode. He's pretty easily overstimulated in new busy places and takes a while to ease into situations. By the 
third hour there, he 'd found one of his favorite friends Matthew (here in the first picture) and they were hilarious! They'd yell "GO!", run from the sandy beach down to the water, crash into the water and throw themselves in backwards, yell "Oh YEAH!" and laugh uproariously then run back up to the sandy area to start over again! Great fun to watch! In that picture, we'd told them to put an arm around their each other as buddies and this is what they thought we meant! As we were ready to head out, Easton's other great friend, Owen - the blonde cutie, showed up and so we had to stay and let them play. We're just so lucky to have great friends with fun little boys for Easton to play with. They have such silly fun together and there's nothing better than hearing your kid squeal in sheer joy with a friend!
McKay is getting more comfortable being independent around water and luckily sticks to the shoreline at the lake or the pool. But he'll let me pick him up and take him in - loves playing motorboat and ring around the rosie if I don't dunk him! Actually, this kid is a HUGE basketball enthusiast! There's a backboard and basketballs at the pool that the older kids play with and he watches in complete fascination, pointing and saying "Baah!" If a ball rolls across the pool deck, he's yells BAA! and chases after it hoping that the kids won't notice it's gone and will let him have it. However, he brings it back to them and tries to engage the older kids in tossing it back and forth with him. If I'm near him, he begs to be taken to the hoop to slam dunk the ball and some nice teenagers gave my arms a break and helped him shoot hoops for quite some time. His face just lights up and he can't stop grinning when he's with the ball and hoop! 
Easton was not into balls and hoops like McKay and McKay regularly heads to the basement to shoot hoops all by himself!As you can see, Easton had completely worn himself out. McKay had konked out before we left the parking lot which was great because it let me listen to an NRLC convention workshop about our lobbying efforts with the pro-life / pro-family coalition at the United Nations. I was supposed to speak the following day to the BYU Washington Seminar interns and needed to refresh my talking points. If you'd like to read my remarks, just let me know and I'll email them.
I'm writing this waiting for Ryan to get home from a trip to Ohio to help a good friend that tried to run a 100 mile endurance race. The heat and humidity proved to be too much and our friend "only" ran 49 miles! Simply amazing and crazy!!! Ryan was part of his pit crew and would have been his pacer for the latter end of the race. I hope they had a good time! I'm still recovering from nursery today - eleven two year olds, a 12x12 room, and NO air conditioning for 1 1/2 hours! AAAAACK!!! Poor kids were dropping like flies by the end, hair matted to their faces. But I did get to chat with two of the moms in there today and made a new friend. I LOVE making new friends!
