Sleep over with the cousins...

My boys miss their cousins... Tricia's kids that is.  They've been gone now for nearly 3 months and still not a day goes by that I don't hear one of my boys talking about her bunch... Yesterday afternoon Spencer asked Noah who his best friend is, to which he replied "Daniel".  Spencer then asked Ian who his best friend is, to which he answered "Bella"... Awww! How sweet.  My boys love their cousins.  It's such a shame we don't live close by them anymore.  No more trips to The Scera to watch movies together; no more trips to the dinosaur museum together; no more jaunts to the mall together; no more preschool together; no more trips to Seven Peaks Waterpark together or the zoo, or the fish aquarium, etc. etc.... we used to do EVERYTHING with our cousins and Aunt Tricia; so much so that I think Cohen thought of Tricia as his second mother!  My boys miss their cousins, and quite frankly, I miss them too.  

I was worried about my little guys, being all alone at family gatherings with no one their own age to play with.  The only other cousins who live here in Utah live more than an hours drive from our home and those cousins are all a lot older than my boys.  They have cousins their age in San Diego, but that's a days drive from home and it's a rare sweet treat when we get to see them.  Spencer's brother has children, but they'd been traveling the world for the last 4 years; living in places like Uruguay, Egypt and Thailand... my kids never really had a chance to get to know his kids prior to them leaving; actually now that I think of it, we only had Noah when they left... our other 3 boys have since joined our family... Aaron (my brother in law) has 5 children. The 3 oldest are girls and his last two are boys.  Coincidentally, his boys are 6 and 4 years old; practically the same ages as my own boys, or at least close enough.  I've been praying for a change all summer long; hoping that either my sister Tricia and her family would move back here to Utah... to my dismay, that hope doesn't stand a chance.. They've settled in Texas and they're loving life living in the state where everything is "bigger and better"... leaving me with only one other hope and that was that Spencer's brother, Aaron, and his family would end their world expedition and come back home to good ol' Utah County so that my boys can grow up near cousins... My wish was answered in August when the OTHER Campbell family, Aaron's, moved home.  My boys are in HEAVEN once again having cousins live close by with whom they can play with.

To celebrate their homecoming, we had a sleepover and play date with Aaron's boys, Eli and Ike.  The boys, my boys particularly, had a blast playing with their cousins!  They spent the evening making their own pizzas and homemade ice cream.  They destroyed the toy room together and played in the pool some that same evening.  They settled down that night on the big comfy couch eating popcorn and drinking hot chocolate and watching a "flick" together.  The boys split up for bedtime... Eli decided to sleep with Noah in his big bed and Ike took the top bunk leaving Ian to sleep on the bottom bunk.  The four really are great matches!  The following morning after the boys  enjoyed an egg, ham and waffle breakfast, they got dressed in their swim shorts so they could enjoy some sun and fun time outback.  Recently in the last month, we had a landscaping company come and clear our jungle of weeds out of the backyard... all that is left after they removed the weeds is a backyard full of dirt.  Chalky, clay like dirt to be exact.  The perfect conditions for digging for dinosaurs!!!  I sectioned off a small portion of the backyard with some orange tent stakes and yellow ribbon, after which I buried 20 dinosaur skeletons... I handed each of the boys their own dinosaur digging tools, a little shovel/dirt sifter and a paint brush looking thingy, and told the boys to DIG... Dig they did.  The sun was beating down on them, IT WAS HOT, so they quenched their thirst with swigs of water...  they got dirty, digging in the chalky dirt, but they're boys, a little filth didn't keep them from completing their mission...

They dug...

... and dug...

... they found all but 8 dinosaur skeletons.

... after about an hour of digging, I decided to step in and help them find the last remaining 8... however I wasn't very helpful because even I couldn't remember WHERE I buried them.  Oh well... we called it quits for the day...  maybe some time between now and next summer when we put our grass in the backyard those other 8 dinosaurs will surface...

The boys chilled off eating popsicles...

... they ran through the sprinklers and played war with water guns...

... By the time Bentley and Cohen awoke from their naps,

we were all ready to head to the pool...

... After playing at the pool for some time

the boys and I changed our clothes

and went to the Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum 

to look at REAL dinosaur bones...

... and once we were done there, we called it a day!  A busy day!!! I was beat, chasing after 6 boys is no s.i.m.p.l.e. task; my boys were exhausted as were Eli and Ike...  more importantly, we all had a FANTASTIC time with cousins!