Friends

We watched our friend's kids for the evening.  These four have such a great time playing together, it's way easier to have all four together than just two of them.

I got these stamps for Parker at Top Ten Toys earlier in the day, so we had a big stamping party.  I think everyone went home with a little ink somewhere on their body!

Flower Garden

Every spring, I plant a vegetable garden, then every summer I swear I'll never do it again.  Nothing ever grows in our yard so I might just as well plant $-bills in the ground for all the veggies we're going to get.  But then, every year I try again hoping for a better result.

So, this year, I decided to just plant flowers in the raised veggie bed.  We picked up two flats at Costco & Parker helped me plant the flowers.

Notice his gardening gloves?  After years of begging for some, I finally went ahead & got Parker his own set of kid-sized gardening gloves.  He's ridiculously excited about those gloves.

Fruit Leather

I have been wanting a food dehydrator forever.  Keith tried making me one, it didn't turn out so well, so I finally ordered one off Amazon.  The kids helped me make our first batch of fruit leather. 

I need to learn to get it started either earlier or later in the day.  By bedtime it still was really wet, so I left it on all night and by morning it was crispy.  It was still good, but closer to freeze-dried fruit than fruit leather.  But, not too bad for our first attempt.

School Photos

Mexico Vacation ~ Day 8 ~ Time to go home!

We had a great vacation, but by the end I think we'd absorbed about as much Vitamin D as our Northwestern-bodies could take, and we were all ready to sleep in our own beds.

Mexico Vacation ~ Day 7 ~ Last Day

There was a window between our porch & the porch for Dad & Jared's room.  The kids loved playing "grocery store" through the window.  I believe that most of the time Parker was the seller and Cecily was buying.

While we were there, they painted all their "rocking" chairs pink (the chairs looked like rocking chairs, but they didn't rock so much), Cecily insisted on trying them each out.

The hammocks were a hit as well.

You can tell how empty the resort was by the fact that we had complete custody of all the hammocks as well as all the rocking chairs pretty much whenever we wanted them.

For our last day, we ordered lunch poolside so the kids could play as long as they wanted.  

You can tell you've been on vacation long enough when your 4-year-old picks the lettuce garnish over the chicken nuggets for lunch.

Since it was our last day, we thought we'd just skip nap time and let the kids play as long as they could.  So, of course, Cecily fell asleep in Keith's lap during lunch.

Parker even got in on the napping action...

...except he was faking it.

Mexico Vacation ~ Day 6 ~ Beach & Pool!

Although we did take a few adventures, the bulk of our vacation was spent either at the beach, or at the pool (or wandering between the two)

Cecily wasn't super excited about the beach this morning, until we told her she could dig for "treasure", then she was pretty excited.

We spent one other morning playing "Wreck-it Ralph" where Keith & I would build sandcastle after sandcastle while the kids wrecked them as fast as we could build.

This pool is AMAZING!  It has three different depths, it's heated to the perfect temperature, and this year, the kids were big enough that we could spend much of our time sitting in the lawn chair watching them & reading our books.  It was fantastic.

The first day we were there, we met a little boy Parker's age and he & Parker totally hit it off and played & played & played.  He left Saturday morning, and fortunately, Saturday afternoon, a Canadian family showed up with a 5-year-old girl and a 2.5-year old boy, so our kids played with them for the rest of vacation, it was great!

One evening, the maids left a towel kitty cat in Dad's room.  The kid's adopted it as their pet for the rest of vacation.