Up, Up and Away!

I'm not sure why, but during June most of the towns in Utah have city celebrations, and Springville is no exception. For the last two weeks our town has been celebrating Art City Days with lots of fun events like baby contests and children's parades and art contests. However, the top of our list for Art City Days was the balloon race. Colby and I had never seen a hot-air balloon up close, and Brian has been regaling us with tales of the one in New Mexico for years, so we definitely had to go check this one out.Ah, but notice that fake smile. We got tickets to take a tethered balloon ride and Colby was having none of it! Watching the balloons fill and take off was pretty cool, though, so we had to satisfy ourselves with that, albeit from a safe distance so Colby couldn't hear or feel the fire :)
The giant piggy bank balloon from the Bank of American Fork was my favorite by far, and now I'm really excited to see the balloon festival in New Mexico because Brian told me they have a huge cow, which I'm sure is really funny to see next to the giant hamburger balloon.Colby finally got excited just as we were leaving, after all the balloons had lifted off, when he noticed the face painting booth staffed by.....Springville High School cheerleaders, of course! I was surprised that he requested a balloon, but I think what really made him smile was how many times this one cheerleader told him he had adorable cheeks (he really does - they're so kissable!). What a fun morning!

Who needs room to work? But, books - they need their space.

Plainly, I love books. I'd buy a book a day if I could, and it absolutely kills me when I have to get rid of one. As you can see, that doesn't happen too often :) It does mean that I ran out of room in our bookcases. We had two 5-shelf bookcases, side by side, in our office, and there was absolutely no room to add another magazine, let alone another book. To make matters worse, the shelves were starting to bow in the middle. So I've had my eye on a new bookcase for a while, and on Saturday we were finally able to go get it!
We got this at IKEA, and Brian finally got it assembled at about 9:30 Saturday night. After another 2 hours of rearranging and measuring, we finally decided on a spot for it in the office. I had to sacrifice my scrapbook table, but it's worth it because....... I have room for more books! You probably can't see but most of these shelves have books stacked two deep, but there's actually room to spare! This made my week.