Independence Day in Animas, New Mexico!

Wow, this had taken me forever to get around to, sorry it's almost August 4th, but you get to listen to me jabber about July 4th. We spent two weeks visiting family in New Mexico and had a marvelous time. We drove all through the night so that Erik would sleep through the bulk of the drive. It worked fairly well...

It got dark as we were in Louisiana, and the sun came up as we were in Western Texas. Funny how as we were headed to Mississippi the first time I thought this was the worst part of the drive, but when the sun came up and I looked around at the scenery, I was so excited! It looked like home! We still had several more hours of driving to do, but I knew we were getting close. I guess it's just in my blood, I can't help loving this place!

Once we got to Animas to visit my family, it was so much fun. Erik was not always sure that he liked being surrounded by new people, but he sure enjoyed all the spoiling and extra attention he got. We were all so glad to be out of the car and surrounded by everyone we love. 24 hours of driving is just no fun.
One of the first things I noticed about NM was the difference in the humidity. It was still hot, but to me it didn't even feel like it because it was so dry. It was so nice to not feel constantly sticky and gross. Erik loved playing outside. Dirt is not something you see much of here in Mississippi, so he was VERY interested in it. At one point he got his hands on a dirt clod and popped it in his mouth to see what it tasted like. Apparently he liked it, because when he saw me coming to take it away he swallowed it. Little stinker.

After he'd drooled mud all down the front of him, we decided to let him play with the garden hose to clean himself off. He loved it! This kid loves water and would've spent all day playing in it if we'd have let him.

After playing outside, Erik was totally worn out, so he snuggled up with Grammy and they napped together for the rest of the afternoon. Doesn't this look so cozy!

Erik isn't the only one who likes to take naps.

We had a really fun 4th of July. We kicked off the morning with a pancake breakfast at the church (yummy!), then enjoyed a day of hanging out playing games and stuff like that. In the evening we went over to Rodeo, NM for their awesome parade (ok, maybe not the most awesome parade ever, but it beat the socks off the Elvis parade we went to). Marquette and Cameron were down for the day and we all had a really fun time.

Dad got to drive the firetruck to represent the Cotton City Fire Department. Kett and Heber went along for the ride, and some how managed to avoid the water balloons we had prepared for them.

As we all know, the only reason people come to things like this is for the candy that's thrown off the floats, right? Erik got to eat his first sucker, and boy oh boy, he thought it was pretty cool stuff!

Another thing we did during the week in Animas, was hit the Lordsburg swimming pool. Erik's been swimming once before this, and he loved it, so we were excited to give it another try. It was actually a fairly cool day, so he didn't get to stay in the water for very long, but he loved every minute of it. 

We made sure Erik (and I) got to spend as much time as possible with his Great Grandpa Darrow and Great  Grandma Sharon. We made several visits over to their house to see them. It was so much fun. 

 Our last day in Animas was especially fun. My cousin Hyrum recently returned from his mission to Dallas Texas, and so we had a big Payne family lunch to celebrate. We all got to hear him speak in church, and then the partying started! It was wild and crazy, with people every where, but it's so so so much fun.

I sure love Southern New Mexico, it was so hard to leave and come back to Mississippi.

LOL

Today I was straightening up the house and made a fun discovery. We've had a box full of random stuff that needed to be thrown away sitting by our door for a few days. Erik finally discovered it this afternoon and, after eating all the junk mail we'd tossed in there, he spread the contents of the box all over the living room. I started cleaning it all up and decided to pop some air bags that were in there from a package we'd received ( you may have seen the kind I'm talking about, it's basically huge bubble wrap) so they'd take up less room in the trash bag. I was afraid Erik would be scared of the noise and was watching really closely for his reaction. This is not what I was expecting!

This and that...

I've been trying to come up with some new adventure to post about, but we've been pretty boring lately. So, instead of anything super fun, I'm just going to give you a glimpse into our daily life. 

Last week Ethan spent a few days helping out at scout camp. They were camping just a few minutes up the road from our house, so when Ethan found out the boys wanted to go fishing, he called and had me bring up his fishing gear. He spent several hours showing the boys the ropes, and Erik and I spent some of that time sitting on the bank hanging out and playing around with our camera. 

 In other news, my garden is managing to limp along. It's all I can do to keep my plants sufficiently watered in this heat, so they're not exactly thriving, but their still alive. Here's last week's harvest: two yellow squash, one cucumber, and one tomato (as well as some parsley, basil, and oregano that we used in various meals throughout the week).

 Today Erik and I have just been catching up on housework. We spent some time folding and putting away the clean laundry...

 Okay so I put it away while Erik pulled it back off the shelves as fast as he could. I think I'm just going to quit folding our clothes because they seem to have a hard time staying folded lately.

 And it's not just Ethan's and my clothes, he gets his own too. Here's Erik's bedroom shelf when he's done with it...

 And just for comparison this is what it looks like when I'm done with it... (note that I gave up folding his clothes as soon as he started pulling up on things, but at least they're sorted into the proper baskets!)

 We also tried finger painting again. We made baby safe paints out of flour, water, and food coloring, and then put them and Erik in the tub so he could just paint wherever he wanted. Naturally the outside of the tub is what he wanted to decorate.

Well, there you have it. There's your sneak peek into the grand adventure of our daily lives. Between our church , Ethan's school work, and Erik, we stay pretty busy most of the time. We are planning a big road trip in a few weeks though, so we should have some fun stuff to post in July.

Tupelo Elvis Festival

Saturday we woke up early and headed north to go to the Tupelo Elvis Festival. We've heard good things about this event, and the website made it look pretty awesome, so we figured why not go check it out. Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, and lived there for some of his childhood, and the city is extremely proud of this fact, so every year they put on what is supposed to be the best Elvis festival around, complete with a preliminary round of the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist competition. There was a parade to start things off, and we made sure to leave home early enough to get to Tupelo in time to fight for a seat along the parade route so we wouldn't miss a thing. When we got there, expecting to have to hunt for parking and then for parade seating, this is what we found along the parade route.

Surely we'd made a mistake. Were we too late? Too early? Did we have the wrong street? So, with only 10 minutes until the beginning of the parade, we decided to hunt around and find out what was up. So we followed the signs to the festival headquarters, and this is what we found there:

Huge crowd, right? We verified the parade details, and we had the right place and time, so we went back to see what would happen. Finding a place to sit was a piece of cake, and we settled in to wait for the parade to start. Here is what we saw.

This was the best Elvis, Ethan and Erik actually got pictures with him later in the day. I didn't post pictures of all 15 of the Elvis's, but here's a sampling of some of them.

The winner of the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist competition:

Elvis with enough grease in his hair for 3 Elvis's:

Young Elvis, who thought that because he's "young Elvis" he didn't need a costume:

Ummm, you can think of a caption for this next one...

This guy's idea of an Elvis costume is having black hair, and wearing a scarf and a huge gold watch:

After the Elvis's, there were two floats (and a few other cars representing different businesses but they looked just like any other car driving down the road so they didn't make the cut here). This first one was our favorite, because they gave us coupons for free milkshakes!

And that was it. The parade didn't take too much longer to drive past where we were sitting than it probably did for you to read this post, so we had almost a whole hour to kill before the free live entertainment started back at the festival headquarters. We wandered around downtown Tupelo and looked all all the little shops, and the fun old buildings. It was fun to just wander around and see the town.

In case you can't see the letters on here, this is a monument to the CSA (Confederate States of America). It was a neat statue, and really interesting to look at.

All over down town Tupelo are these guitars, painted by different artsits to honor Elvis.

Erik was SO not excited about having to wear his hat. We battled over that one all day! He did really enjoy his string of beads one of the Elvis's threw out at the parade though.  

Finally, it was time to make our way back towards the festival and see what was on the program for the free, live entertainment. "Elvis" walked up onto the stand and we were all set to hear a fake Elvis concert. Turns out he was just the emcee for the Elvis Pet Look-a-like Contest. There were five dogs dressed up as Elvis that took turns parading around the stage, but apparently this little guy is some kind of local celebrity, and the crowd went NUTS when he came on the stage. After the pet show, we decided to call it quits and go get our free milkshakes.

 We did make one last stop though, as we were headed back to our car. Ethan just couldn't pass up this photo op.

We went to Sam's Club and hit all the sample tables (Saturdays at lunch time is THE time to do this by the way), hit Sonic for some lunch, and then Chik-fil-a for our milkshakes. Then we headed back home again. It really was a fun day. It was nice to get out of Starkville and do something different, even if it wasn't what we had thought it was going to be.