The Wright Family: End of Summer fun

As Summer draws to a close, its time for back to school. I'll start out posting some pics of my cute older kiddos on their first day of school. Here's Dallin. This handsome little guy started 2nd grade!

Little Hailee started Preschool. She was so excited and ready to go! I just love taking pictures of her because she loves having her picture taken and all of her poses are a lot of fun

Showing off her new Frozen backpack

Dropping her off at Preschool. She was so brave! I thought she would be scared, but she wasn't at all!

Now for the rest of the pictures, I don't even know where to start. I guess it might be easiest to do it kind of in order so I don't have to move pictures around too much.

Kyle likes to win things on the radio. We've had the opportunity to do a lot of things because of him winning all the time. Sometimes they are silly things, but a lot of times they are some pretty cool stuff. This month one of his prizes was a Western experience dinner at the Bar T5 in Jackson. It was actually really neat. We didn't bring the kids with us, because we only won two tickets, and just to bring Dallin with us would have cost more than $40! When we got there, I couldn't believe how many people were there. Even our wagons were full of large families. They loaded us up in wagons and we went up the trail to where we were going to have dinner. I can't believe the money some of these tourists fork out for a "Western" experience. There were even a couple of families in our wagon that were from the East and they had forked out nearly $1000 a person to go up in the mountains with guides for 4 days and 3 nights. It did include meals and gear to use, but wow, I can't imagine spending thousands of dollars for a large family to do that.
Here is a picture of all of our wagons:

Pretty view

They even had "Indians" on the trail

More "Indians"

When we got there, we had a really nice dinner and good ol' fashioned western entertainment.

Beautiful view on the way down the trail

It was a really neat experience. I thought it was really interesting to see the people from all over. There were even quite a few people from other countries (even Australia, England, France, etc). Its pretty cool that we have this type of thing almost in our backyard. I wish the kids could have come, but not for that price :)

Like I mentioned earlier, Hailee loves to have her picture taken, and she loves to pose. Here are just a few more pictures that I've taken of her during the month:
Hailee in her Anna dress and her Anna doll. She sure loves Frozen!

I asked her to take a picture of the necklace she was wearing so I could send it to Nana. She immediately dropped what she was doing and did this little pose. haha

Chocolate Pudding mustache

Playing on the trampoline with awesome looming storm clouds in the background

Posing with all her ponies

Playing outside in the rain in an outfit she put together herself: Her leotard and swimming suit :)

Our next set of pictures is from a fun little weekend trip we took down to Bear Lake. On Friday we went to the Minnetonka cave.
On our walk to the cave, Hailee was pretty excited

But as soon as we got to the entrance, she got a little scared. I remember feeling the same way when I was a kid too.

The first stairway

Dallin was having a good time. He really enjoyed it. Its a perfect place for little boys with active imaginations

The lighting isn't good, so its hard to see faces in the pictures

Hailee started to warm up after she realized that it wasn't ever going to get super dark

Owen was a little hesitant at first, but he ended up liking it too. Especially because he got a free ride on Daddy's back :)

At the deepest point of the cave of the tour

On Saturday we went to Bear Lake. It was a beautiful day!

Owen had a lot of fun too!

The kids had so much fun all afternoon

Hailee with Daddy in the background

Elsie pulling me and Owen in the little raft

Dallin and Elsie in the raft

We had a great time! Bear Lake really is a perfect place to go for the kids to play in the sand and swim

Here is a picture of my cute boys looking through the window at the garbage truck. Its one of Owen's favorite things to do every Tuesday morning.

Goofy little picture of my cute little guy in the shopping cart with a lampshade on his head

We had to run some errands that day because we were preparing for this little guy's Birthday! Owen turned 2 this month! He is such a special little guy and so good natured. We love him so much!

During his little Birthday party it was hard to get him to stop long enough to smile for a picture so I was able to get some videos and take pictures from the videos.

He was SO excited when we brought him the Birthday cake. He squealed in delight!

We've been trying to make the most out of every day since we know Summer is coming to a close. The kids have been playing outside a lot. There was one afternoon that was a perfect temperature with barely a breeze and the kids played out in the sandbox for the entire afternoon until evening! They had brought out their little toys to play in the dirty water and they just thought it was the funnest thing ever.

We were lucky enough to have a really nice day towards the end of August (even though it had been raining so much that it broke rain records!) We took one last boating trip. I took my friend Becki and her kids and everyone had a lot of fun! I even got Owen to ride the tube, and he loved it!