The joys of Summer

Summer always inspires such lovely fashion. Cherry tree skirt is an Alia original design.

Water is an essential ingredient to every summer.

We've eaten tons of watermelon and delicious juicy fruit. Including these yummy blackberries we gathered from the trial by our park. Funny that these plants are classified as "noxious weeds" where we live. Their fruit sure makes yummy blackberry cobbler. The inevitable scratches from their big thorns are worth it.

We've climbed trees and park equipment a lot!

I love visiting the beaches each summer.
Discovering driftwood, rocks and sand. Collecting treasure...

..then bringing it home to wash and enjoy.
It's been a great Summer and we are filled with lots of happy, fun memories to remember.

Back we go to Idaho!

We took another trip to Idaho in July for a family reunion. Here's what we did...

Matt tried root beer for the first time and loved it! Who doesn't love homemade root beer?

My girls got their first ride on a waterslide.

They loved every minute of it!
Plug your nose!
The pool was fun too.

We enjoyed lots of time with our relatives.

Then we bid Idaho farewell.

On the drive back we were almost home when all the freeway lanes closed for an hour for some rock blasting. A lot of people got out of their cars and made the most of it. There were some teenagers skateboarding and a family playing frisbee. Madelyn and I went into the trees that lined the freeway - for reasons I won't mention but you can probably guess - and as we were coming back we hear this bagpipe music start playing. Imagine our surprise as we come out of the trees to see an impromptu performance by this guy. Pretty cool.

Our girls think it's great that they can say that they have played on a freeway.

First tooth

Well...I'm finally getting around to documenting this one month and three teeth later. Matthew did indeed start sprouting teeth last month and he has continued with that trend so he now has two sets of top and bottom teeth.

Cougar Mountain Zoo

Meeting up with our friends at Cougar Mountain Zoo was fabulous.
At the first of the year, Madelyn's best friend moved 3 hours away from us. Very sad day! So we found a somewhat halfway point to meet and had a nice outing. It was great, even if we didn't see any REAL cougars at the COUGAR Mountain Zoo.

The only cougar we saw that day. He was pretty impressive though for being a statue.
My favorite part was seeing the tigers up close. These are my favorite animals. It was neat being so close to these majestic animals.
This zoo is home to a large herd of Reindeer. We didn't see any with a big red nose, but we did learn that reindeer are very good swimmers. Each hair on a reindeer is hollow and filled with air for extra insulation against the cold. This feature also makes them very buoyant.
This zoo has tons and tons of these bronze statues. (I think one of the largest collections in the US). The kids had fun looking at them and sitting on them.
Sign...what sign?
Hmmm...

Playgroup

I organized a playgroup for the summer with a plan to visit various parks around our area. This one happens to be our island adventure. We got to ride a ferry over and play on a sandy beach. The weather was a bit cloudy at first but ended up being lovely as the day went on.

Matt loved playing in the sand with his friend. They played for a good 15 minutes with this piece of driftwood.

My cute niece