This was taken today at Waldo park, a great afternoon for play after the morning rain. The kids started making faces at me once they noticed I was taking pictures of them, but I enjoyed trying to use some of our beautiful foliage for some framing since it won’t be around much longer!

Today Celia had her 5th birthday and we had a small party with some of her friends! We hung out at my parents house, bounced in the bounce house, played limbo, played the ‘animal game’, and decorated star-shaped boxes for takehomes. They also played with the balloons. Simple pleasures of a five year old!

The bounce house keeps on going!

Celia under the limbo stick!

Sometimes they decided to go over the stick

Celia waiting for cake with her friends

There’s the cake!

Celia jumps for joy with the balloons!

This was her cake dress, she had to add it on before she could eat cake!

Today we went to have lunch with my mom and dad at my dad’s office. They have some nice picnic tables outside and the kids can be loud and active without being a problem in a work environment. Plus homeschooling lets us hang out with people during the day! They were playing a ‘spy’ game where they hid and signaled when someone found them. I set up my shot, and then announced dessert was served and so they showed up pretty quickly from hiding!

The logs are from last years holiday party theme. They literally made a cake that was almost half the size of this real log pile for the party for hundreds of people. It was good cake, but rather odd looking as I wouldn’t say logs are appetizing.

The kids down at Magnolia park on the swings. Ewan practicing his new tricks and skills hanging by the belly on the big kid swings.

Our other big activity for going to Cape Cod is always the beach! We went for two big trips, and then again for some picture taking sessions. The kids loved digging in the sand. Celia and Josie loved going out deep in the water and playing on the boogie boards. They were a lot more confident this year than last and wanted to go out beyond the safe areas. At one point the tide was coming back in so fast that we almost got in over my head and I had to pull them back in against their wishes. Also for fun in the water was the new phone case I got my dad that is waterproof. So we took it out in the pool, and out in the ocean and it kept working and snapping and we didn’t even loose it!

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My dad flying his kite! We didn’t lose it this year!

The kids up in the lifeguard chair!

The picture of Ewan with the duck whistle, RIP duck whistle 2015.

The turtle wars!!!

Smiles on the porch with sisters goggles!

One day I made oobleck for the kids, cornstarch and water. Cheap easy entertainment when you can get messy outside!

Jordi under water!

Josie in the water!

Celia on the boogie board!

Post beach nap.

Ewan on a boogie board!

Here’s how non-graceful I end up looking on my photo shoots, this time I had to do it in a dress. It was super windy!

Lots of these photos are courtesy of my dad.

If we haven’t talked to you lately, you may not know that we bought more house! The house above our house! And we’ve started some construction, it’s not going quickly, but we are standing in the photo above in the wall we removed. And lots of electrical work was done, but that’s not very noticeable. Working on painting now, replacing a door, restoring the tub and then we’ll refinish the floors before moving upstairs to do more work downstairs!

Brr as fall starts to set in around here I better finish remembering our summer. At the end of July we were at Cape Cod and having a lovely time at our rental house in Mashpee.

A lot of our time at the cape we spend hanging out in the backyard and playing in the pool. This year we saw some fantastic leaps in swimming abilities for Celia and Josie. Josie had been swimming without any flotation device in lessons this year but she was still a bit nervous about it. Celia loves to use her floaties, but she made the mistake of jumping in once without them and then swimming across the pool. Then I pointed out to her that she had done it by herself. At first she was shocked and scared, but eventually she was proud of herself for having done it. As always with the pool comes the ice cream! That is one of their favorite parts. I prefer not having to clean the kids up after eating, as they just get wet and cleaned in the pool mostly. They are not neat ice cream cone eaters.

My parents had brought a bunch of inflatibles, a giant ball, two turtles and two tubes. The turtles were fun for having ‘turtle wars’ where you try to bounce them into one another and see who comes up on top. The girls spent a lot of time hopping in and out of the pool with the toys, riding on different ones. Ewan was harder to convince to get into the pool. He spent more time walking around it although we did get him to wear the puddlejumpers a lot of the time so we wouldn’t feel the need to chase him constantly. He liked to play with water on the side and pour it into cups. Eventually I dragged him into the pool and he started to like riding around on the turtles which he calls ‘ugas’, short for ‘tortuga’ (turtle in spanish). I made him do some swimming too but he wasn’t terribly fond of it yet, or even jumping in. He used to enjoy jumping in last year.

Another toy we brought with us was Jordi’s new water rocket he got for fathers day. We took it out to the high schools field with lots of space, and it was good we had the space. This rocket really launches! It was super cool and lots of fun to fill it up and pump it up with the bike pump.

This was Thursday morning right before lunch. As we were doing all this I started to get some phone calls from our carpenter. Our neighbor it seems had found our front doors open that morning and shut them for us. We had a cat sitter coming in twice a day to medicate the cats (argh). Somehow she managed to leave the front door open although swears she wasn’t using it because she couldn’t figure it out. The carpenter had the keys and went into the house to check on the cats at the behest of the neighbor. He couldn’t find a cat (two were upstairs, but only one was found downstairs when there should have been two). So I called the cat sitter and she came from work and couldn’t find George either. We let things settle a bit while we had lunch, I made some more calls back and forth and still no George despite ripping the house apart. There was no sign of him so we made the decision that Jordi would go back home to look for George. Good thing we were less than two hours away at least.

Jordi went home that afternoon, confirmed George was still missing and stayed up late trying to find him. Early the next morning thankfully George reappeared outside in our garage and after chasing him a few times around the house, Jordi was able to catch him and return him to safety. But that cost Jordi a day of vacation by the time he was able to clean up, eat and drive back. Then again at the end of the trip, the cat sitter managed to lock her keys in our house and called fire department before talking to us (and our neighbors who had a key). Thanks to the AFD for showing up, but we did finally get ahold of a neighbor with a full set of keys. But that cat sitter will not be back.

Back again with one more installment about the beach, and the ‘gift’ I conveniently gave my dad for his birthday.

Tonight at dinner they decided to put their heads together and do some weird chanting. I ran for the camera. This week I did have a backup photo though, but I liked this one better. Black bean soup on the face and all.

This morning while working with Josie on her school work, I set Ewan up at the table for one hour of working. He:

-colored pasta noodles with markers

-colored on the tray

-stamped with an ink pad and farm stamps

-cut up the paper with scissors

-cleaned up the tray

-pouring water into little cups and containers

-cleaned up pouring water

-cut string with scissors

-thread the pasta on the string

All in one hour.

Had an epic fail remembering the camera while bringing Josie to field hockey and them farm school, so no outdoor pictures on one of the most gorgeous days of the year sadly. Instead the kids are enjoying the new bathroom light and fan in our downstairs bathroom which lights it up much brighter and actually removed the humid air (our last fan just sort of made noise it seemed). Our bathroom is always a busy place.