Carson is starting to crawl and he is getting into EVERYTHING. It's pretty cute. He could easily spend all day crawling around the house entertaining himself. He's also starting to pull himself up. He's been trying to do that a lot lately and he was finally successful today. It shocked me. He isn't even crawling all that well yet so I wasn't expecting him to be able to do that this soon. It shows he's always surprising me.

Pictures from 4th of July. We went out to Airway Heights and set off our own fireworks. We have been doing that for a few years now. Usually people are just setting off the little fun ones but this year people got serious! Tons of people had the big aerials. It was neat but a tad scary.

Carson wanted to drive on the way back.

Here are some pictures from our camping trip in Republic!!!

We went camping this last weekend. It was our first time camping with little Carson. We went to Republic with two of my sisters (Sara & Melissa) their spouses & children and their father and step-sister and her children. (Yes, lots of people!). Plus we brought along our friends Jesse & Alisha and their two little ones, Reese & Emery. It was really nice to get away and we treated it like a mini-vacation. Josh had four days off in a row!!!! It was awesome. It's great to know that we can camp with such a young child. I was surprised by how easy it was. I was expecting it to be much more difficult considering the needs of a baby. His stuff did take up most of the room in our car though! Carson was an angel the entire time. Well I guess he gave Daddy a little grief when I went to take a shower later in the evening on one of the days, but other than that he played and had a good time. Even though the lake was freezing, he loved it. He immediately started splashing and playing. I'll post some pictures of our trip soon.

Also, we had a major blessing happen this past week. Sacred Heart gave us some financial assistance and paid for most of our medical bills leftover from my two ER visits during the pregnancy, Carson's hospital stay, and my surgery. It is a HUGE relief and an answer to our many prayers. We owed about $4,500.00 and now we only owe a very maneagble $650.00!!!! Sacred Heart is truly amazing!

Another little tidbit. We started cloth diapering Carson. I got whats called all-in-ones. They're the cloth version of disposables and are soooo easy! You don't use bleach and they take very little detergent to clean. Also, no presoaking. You just throw the diapers in the wash as is. I didn't believe the instructions when I read that but everything just washes away. To get rid of stains you lay them out in the sun. It works too. Every time I do that they are white again. It's like magic! We still use disposables for trips and when we're away from home but it has significantly cut down on the amount of diapers we were constantly hauling out to the trash.

We had a yard sale this last weekend. It was a combined sale with our friends Jesse & Alisha. It was a lot of work, but we were able to clear out our basement of unneeded items and we also made some pocket cash. The economy made it surprisingly tough because people were being really careful about their purchases, even about just $2.00 items. Each person really thought it through first, which was bad for us, and everyone was talking us down in price, which we obliged, but even then they sometimes wouldn't buy it. People were refusing items over the fact that we wouldn't bring down the price another $.25 to $.50, even after knocking $5.00 to $10.00 or more off the price. It was very different from our yard sale last year where people didn't put a lot of thought into the purchase and the overall attitude was, well this stuff is so cheap who cares. I thought our sales would be better this year because of the fact that people are really needing to be frugal during these times and even though we had three times the amount of people show up and more stuff we made the same amount as last year. We decided we'd hold off on anymore yard sales until the economy gets better. We're hoping that will be by next year so we can continue on with our annual yard sale.

We picnicked at the park last week. It was fun getting out and enjoying the beautiful weather. We're looking forward to more evenings like this one.

Carson helping us set up our new pool. It's all finished now, we're just waiting for it to warm up enough to use!