Pickin' Berries

It had been awhile since I had picked berries and I missed the fun experience, so I took the kids to a raspberry farm this week. We all had a great time and the weather was perfect, but there were too many mosquitoes! Austin was most affected by them. He enjoyed the experience at the beginning and ate many raspberries (more than he put in his bucket by far!), but told me he wanted to go home after about 20 mosquito bites. I think in this picture there were some buzzing around Karissa's face.

Victoria said, "This is the life!" She had so much fun picking that she didn't notice the mosquito bites she got.

Yummm!

The best part is eating them off your finger!

Mermaid Camp

Karissa attended her special activity for the summer- mermaid camp! It was every morning at a private school where Victoria attended princess camp a few years ago. She really enjoyed doing her own activity. Since I wasn't able to watch, all I know is that they played games, made art projects, made blue pudding with gummy fish, and danced to The Little Mermaid music. Here she is with her teacher and assistant in her giant, soaking-wet shirt from the water table. Here is the star fish, sea urchin, and coral (made out of colored rice) she made.

She also made this mermaid mobile, fish, and jelly fish.
Victoria enjoyed hanging out with Austin and I without Karissa for a change. In fact, she told Jason after the first day, "I got to go to the park with Mommy all by myself!" forgetting that Austin was even there. She happily hung up Karissa's work from the light fixture in their room.

Even though Karissa said she was nervous the first day, when she walked into the room, all that was forgotten! So far my kids have no problems in new situations!

Soccer Camp

Victoria decided about a year ago that she really wanted to try soccer. I thought a little soccer camp over the summer, to give her an idea of what it is like, would be a good place to start. Since I never played a day of soccer in my life, if you don't count P.E. here and there in school, I was surprised that she wanted to do it, but glad she wanted to try something new. She loved it and learned some good things over the five days. I learned some things too, like shin guards go under the socks, not over! (I actually knew that, but had forgotten that the first day when I helped her get ready, but we learned the proper way after we arrived!)

Here are some shots of her playing some the soccer skills' games.

with her supportive siblings who happily played at the playground behind the field for most of the days...

In the end, she said she liked soccer, but wanted to stick with dance for now and play soccer once-in-a-while. I thought that's what she would decide, but glad we got to explore something other than dance for a while.

While Victoria was busy with that, Karissa learned to pump by herself on the swing (hooray for me!)

and gained more confidence riding her "big" Dora bike, well, bigger than her tricycle anyway! She does go much faster now that she's on a bike.

12 years

Jason and I have been married 12 years- wow! It's amazing how different it is now, compared to the five years when we didn't have kids. Though there was less going on in our lives, it has definitely been more fulfilling and we have grown closer since we have had children. I always felt like a newly-wed for those first five years, and I have learned so much more about marriage and families since then. I am grateful for the power of prayer and inspiration and that we took the big step to be married when we did, it has been worth every minute of it!

We celebrated yesterday by going out to a small Italian restaurant. Then we did what we haven't done in years- we went to the movie theater! Since we just barely saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I from Netflix, we had to finish it off by seeing Part II in the theater, rather than waiting another year. It was worth it! The movie ended earlier than we thought and wanted to give the babysitter time to finish putting the kids to bed, so we enjoyed some yummy Kilwan's ice cream.

Here's looking forward to another 12 wonderful years!

(24 weeks pg)

Our Personal Sauna

It was so hot and humid here this week that I felt like I was entering a sauna every time I went outside! The high on the hottest day was 101 degrees with a heat index of 115 degrees! To give you a perspective, the average this time of year is 84. It's like getting snow in LA, people just aren't used to it and we're not prepared for that kind of heat; like Jason's tennis court where he practiced in TX. had an ice machine. They just cancelled everything around here, such as Victoria's outdoor supervised playground program she and Bethany go to M/W/F for three hours to do activities with other kids and are supervised by college students. (It's the best spent $20 for the summer-ever!) Luckily, on Friday they had a field trip planned to the roller skating rink, so they got to be there for a few hours.

Here the kids are running through the sprinklers at 7 pm to cool down before going to bed. I didn't want to take them out earlier, for their benefit as well as mine!

Austin just loves Bethany, who he calls "Bet-ny", she's like another sister to him.

Summer Days

This week we helped Daddy clean the bike chains. Found a preying mantis on the window (we made sure to put it back in the grass later on).

We went to Music in the Park to hear the Saline Fiddlers, which was fabulous, but I have no pictures from it. The kids enjoyed our picnic and dancing to the music.

We started swimming lessons. Here's Victoria in her class with the kick board.

Here's Karissa with her "barbell" in her class.

And we played with our neighbor Bethany, who we see every day when she comes over while her parents work.
We have very unusually hot week coming up, so we'll see if we can survive the next week of summer!

Snoozin' at the Zoo

On Friday night Victoria and I got to go to the Toledo Zoo with her girl scout troop for the Zoo Snooze. It was a great experience and we both learned a lot! We learned a lot about the polar bears and seals since we got to meet the keeper of those animals. Even though he told the girls that someone got eaten by some polar bears there a while ago (he also mentioned the guy was high and jumped into the water with them), they still enjoyed learning about them and no one woke up with nightmares! Victoria's favorite part was touching some animals in the learning center. She got to touch a hissing cockroach (eww!) Here she is after touching the Leopard Gecko.

A Chinese Alligator,

she touched a tree frog, and a Frilled Lizard and they got to see a tarantula up close in it's cage (yuck!) Though I didn't enjoy some of them, she enjoyed every single one.

After eating some pizza we learned about how to train zoo animals from a zoo keeper and then made some enrichment foods for the animals to be fed the next day. When we were done making the enrichment at 11:30 pm, we got to look at some animals at night; the cheetahs, tigers, and elephant who was mad and blowing dirt at us.

By the time midnight came and we were led to the museum to sleep, everyone was so tired from all the activities that we didn't have a bunch of giggling all night long, much to my relief!

At 7 am the next day they woke us up and we had breakfast then got a private tour of the zoo. Victoria stayed in front the whole time with the guide, she didn't want to miss a thing! We got to see the keepers feed our enrichments to the three animals we made them for. Here's the otter chasing after her fish pops. She moved so fast I couldn't get a good shot of her face.

Here's one of the orangutans enjoying an oatmeal-covered wreath with four grapes stuck to it.
Here's the rhino, though we didn't see him eating the melon bomb, which was a cantaloupe with carrots poked through all around it.

We were tired when we left, but it was definitely worth-while!