Hello Everyone! This has been such a busy month with so many fun things going on that I thought I should give dad a break and post for him. Let's see. . . the last post was Jude's birthday post. Since then we had Father's Day. Ben was not fully recovered from his sinus surgery and urged Jude and I to join the rest of the family out at Grandpa Whitt's to celebrate Father's Day so he could get some much needed rest. I did catch a picture of Ben and Jude on Father's Day. As you can see, Jude was not at his best that day either.



This year was the 1st annual "Cousin's Day" with the Whittington family. What a blast! We spent the day out at Johnny and Patty's house with three generations of Whittington's eating, swimming, fishing, and catching up. No doubt this event brought memories of the days spent up at the cottage in Marblehead. It was so great to see everyone and to spend some time catching up. I am looking forward to the Fall family get together out there and for many more "Cousin's Day's" to come.

We spent the 4th of July in Salem. Ben and I got to go visit our dear friends Erin and Eric for a night while G-pa and Mimi took care of Jude. Then we spent the day at the Country Club swimming, eating and playing on the playground. It was a great holiday!

Early in July we took Jude to his first Indian's game. Ben sure was a proud papa carrying his boy into the stadium. And to our surprise, Jude really seemed to enjoy himself. There was so much to look at and great things to eat. And I think we now know that we don't have to worry about peanut allergies as we discovered him chewing on peanut shells sometime in the third inning.

Monday evening Mimi, G-pa and Aunt Whitney (aka Aunt Weej) came to stay with us for the week. Ben and I are taking on some projects this summer and G-pa came to help us with one. We put in a paver patio! While this looked like it was going to take forever and a day to finish we were completely amazed when we came home from work Tuesday and G-pa had moved 6 tons of gravel by wheelbarrow from our driveway to the back yard and leveled it all by himself! The project moved quickly with Ben and I helping as much as we could in the evenings and by Thursday night we were relaxing out on the completed patio! We just need to finish some of the landscaping around it and the back yard will be complete. We can't thank the Thayer's enough for all of their help last week!

Just a quick update on Ben, he had his sinus surgery in June and he seems to be getting a little better. The full recovery is taking longer than an anticipated but I am staying optimistic that in just weeks he will be better than ever. Thank you to everyone for the prayers and concern. We love you and are truely blessed. Thank you for checking in on us! Hopefully we'll post again really soon!