Baptizing and Bowling

Amy, Jacob, my mom, my dad, Mike and baby Michael, Keri and Beau, Rus, Tyler

Luke, Bekah, Sarah, Joshua (gotta love bekah and sarah sticking out their tongues!)

Rus and I had the wonderful privilege of being at Joshua's baptism on Saturday. Joshua is my sister Amy's oldest boy. He is so fun and helpful and, as everyone pointed out, super shiny! My dad performed the baptism because Mike is not a member of the Church. But as you see he was there and was really supportive. Joshua really wanted to go bowling for his birthday, so that's where we went after the baptism and lunch. It was a lot of fun! If I remember right, Mike scored the highest, and then Tyler, me, Bekah, Jacob, Joshua, Luke, Amy, Dad, Rus, and Sarah. Bekah was very excited to beat everyone, but to be fair, she did have the bumper rails, and those pins fell down out of sheer intimidation, because the ball wasn't going that fast at ALL! I took a million pictures of us bowling and then I only included the following ones because the rest were of everyone's backsides. :) I'll put the captions above each picture...

My Dad and Beau...doesn't he look so big and grown up?! (Beau, I mean.) Tyler and Bekah and Jacob

I LOVE my brother Tyler. He is so much fun and so great with my kids, despite having a pretty strong aversion to messes, disorder, craziness, and kids that drool and sometimes smell.

Bekah and Sarah are very best friends.

Here they are with cute matching hair and Sarah's very unique display of fashion sense.
(What am I saying? It's not like Bekah's clothes even matched!)

Sarah and her ball that probably weighs a quarter of her weight. She was so adorable bowling.
After a while Rus just started yelling at the kids to

"Run really fast and throw the ball as hard as you can!"

Despite that wonderful advice, here he was giving Jacob's ball an extra push to help it get to the pins in under 10 minutes. In case you didn't know, you actually can gutter a ball on a lane with bumpers. It takes skill and the ultimate test of patience, as the ball has to be going very, very slow, but it can happen.

Here is my dad's super excited expression after getting a strike...Okay, so maybe it's the instant replay version, as I was not quick enough to get the original, but it is accurate.

And here is Amy and Tyler when my dad got the strike. Why all the excitement? Well, he had already endured the humiliation of several gutter balls and was being severely out-bowled by all of the kids, so to get a strike really boosted his morale. (But didn't really help his score. Nope, not much. Bekah still beat him.)
Michael giving Beau a hug.

Amy delivers big babies, but within a year of their lives they ultimately become midgets, whereas my kids become..umm..fat. That's why Grandpa (or was it Tyler?) held on to Beau. So he didn't turn Michael into a midget pancake.

And here is everyone relaxing after bowling. Ahhh...So we had a blast. I am blessed with such a fun family, and I'm grateful for the extras we've convinced to hang out with us for the rest of forever. (Thank you Mike and Rus!) Mike was funny... I guess after the baptism he was not super thrilled to go bowling, and Amy said,

"I guess today is full of things you don't really like to do! What could we do next that you wouldn't enjoy?"

To which Mike responded goodnaturedly,

"Scrabble?"

(Yep, that's another family tradition that none of the inlaws really like.)

Okay, I guess that is more than enough! Have a wonderful day!