Fourth of July in Washington, and a Big First for James!

On Thursday afternoon, my cousin Emily started chatting with me on Facebook and asked if we'd like to come up to their house in Puyallup, Washington for the weekend. I talked to Paul about it when he got home, and we decided that was a great idea! We packed up and drove there that very evening. :) Thanks to Debbie and Brent for having us! We had a wonderful weekend!

Here are some pictures of what we did in Washington:

We went to the Calls' ward Fourth of July breakfast and filled up on delicious food:


We played 3 on 4 baseball at the park behind the Calls' house (poor Ryan got a fat lip...no pictures of that, though):

"Go Dad!"

We played croquet (Debbie and Brent's team won. Paul and I were close though! We even made it to poison status!):


We set off fireworks in the cul de sac (It's hard to capture pictures of fireworks, but it was lots of fun.):


And last, but most important, we took James to his first Major League baseball game in Seattle!
(Doesn't James look like he thinks it's the coolest to be sitting there in his dad's lap at a ball game? :) ):

We had a great time. The game was so fun (the Mariners won), we got a third hat for our wall (for those who don't know, Paul and I buy a hat at each stadium we go to...we hope to make it to all of them in our lifetime), and James enjoyed it. Well, he mostly enjoyed it. The funniest part of the weekend was that James wasn't phased in the least by the booming fireworks--And let me tell you, they were incredibly loud and numerous. They rattled the windows! And yet James didn't care. He even went to bed at his normal bedtime on Friday, and slept right through all the fun--But when it comes to crowds cheering at a baseball game, that is apparently thoroughly frightening. James got scared and whimpered every time the crowd cheered suddenly. Poor little guy! Well, I'm sure he'll get used to that, right Grandpa Peterson? ;)


It was great to see my aunt and uncle and cousins! Once again, I'm so glad that we live within short driving distance (just over two and half hours) of some of our family. It's nice to be able to spend a holiday with family.

Oh, and as usual, there are more pictures than I can post here. The rest of them can be found here.

Also, if you look closely at the picture of James smiling earlier on in this post, you can see that he has two teeth coming in! My little guy is growing up fast! Here's a closeup: