August Favorites

A few of my favorite Project Life photos for the month:

 

This was Tyler's next to last day of swim lessons for the summer. I love how happy he looks and knowing that he's genuinely proud of himself. If only I could have frozen time in that moment and prevented his last class from ever happening. If only I would have known he was going to have the most tremendously epic meltdown I've ever witnessed. Now instead of moving on to level 5 swim lessons this fall, I think he may be done for good.

Boys and funny faces: it never gets old.

I love Kyle's "cheese" face. It makes me laugh every single time.

 

In the waiting room of the Children's Village the boys were getting along like a dream, but what's funny to me is knowing that they're recreating a scene from the season finale of Mythbusters where they were testing airplane myths.

Poor Carmelita. Here she thought we were having bonus story time and picked out her seat front and center, but really I was just emptying Kyle's book bag from the library.

 

Pillow forts are always fun.

Again with my cheeseball in the back seat.

 

Working on making the tallest segment of stacker pegs ever.

The August babies in the nest.

 

Sweet innocent Kyle showing me his "owie finger", the one he somehow injured at the beach last month. His nail is a little bruised, but otherwise it's fine.

End of Summer

With school starting this week, I wanted to make sure the boys had fun the last few days of summer vacation.

 

We went to the park:

 

And we went to the pool one last time before it closed for the season:

The local Rotary club funded the construction of a new playground in the park adjacent to the pool, which the boys have enjoyed playing on this summer on days we visit the pool.

All was going well until I came down with a monster cold and spent the remaining days in bed. So the tail end of summer fizzled out, but we gave it a good try.

On Monday the school had an open house for the kids to come in a day early and drop off their school supplies, meet their teacher and so on. Tyler has Mrs. James again this year. The same teacher he had for 2nd grade (who now teaches 4th), and the one who took him in last year to help him finish out his 3rd grade year.

Tuesday was the first day of school.

Tyler is a 4th grader now and it's his last year of elementary school. Next year he'll be heading off to the middle school for 5th and 6th grade. Crazy!

Bunches of Berries

Last weekend we went to pick blueberries at West Valley U-Pick, a farm just a few miles down the road from our house. Summer is quickly coming to a close and I wanted to make sure we got out there before it was too late in the season and all the good berries were gone. We went after dinner when it had cooled down a bit so it was much more tolerable out in the field.

 

Kyle goes through phases with his favorite fruits, but generally he doesn't care to eat plain blueberries all that much....unless, apparently, he's picking them himself and then he can't stop eating them.

We worked hard for about 90 minutes and then at 8:00 (closing time) we brought our buckets over to the scale and ended up with just over 5 pounds of berries. I've already made blueberry crumb cake for Rick to take to work and now I'm trying to decide whether to make blueberry muffins, or a peach/blueberry cobbler or blueberry crumb bars. I guess I'll have to make all three!

Happy Birthday!

My birthday this year was just like any other Monday with Rick at work and me at home with the boys. I kept to my usual Monday routine and ran 3 miles on the treadmill and then went to the store to do the weekly grocery shopping, but it was the surprises throughout the day that made it special.

 

My first surprise of the day was a flower delivery.

Then I went to Starbucks to get my free birthday drink, which was a venti tripe shot soy latte. I don't usually get the extra shot or soy milk, but if they're paying for the upgrade...what the heck! And since I placed my order at 1:59, I was able to turn around at 2:00 and use my receipt for the afternoon $2 grande cold drink special and I got the boys a strawberry n crème Frappuccino to share. Treats for everyone!

Once Rick came home from work I was able to open some presents.

I got a subscription to Birchbox, which sends you beauty samples in the mail on a monthly basis. This is a peek inside my first box and I've already tried the eyeliner and the nail polish.

 

I also got a new necklace that was a near perfect match for the nail color. It was all meant to be.

A new salad bowl and spoon set.

A speaker for the kitchen that syncs with my cell phone so I can listen to Pandora or whatever else.

Also some new workout gloves, a gift certificate to the hair salon and candy.

For dinner we went to Creekside West and I ordered the Salmon dinner and a glass of wine.

Back at the house we cut into the ice cream cake for dessert. Strawberry cheesecake ice cream with chocolate cake. Mmmm, and with all that sugar the boys were bouncing off the walls until nearly 11:00 at night.

Waldo Finale/Prize Drawing

Last night was the grand finale and prize drawing for the Find Waldo Local event hosted by Inklings bookshop. We were so excited about it this year that we found Waldo at all 26 locations in the first two weeks of July and then I spent a few extra days putting together some costumes for us to wear to the party.

 

I found some inexpensive red and white striped shirts at Walmart and Old Navy for us to wear and then I made some stretchy knit hats to match our shirts. I think they came out really nice and we even got several compliments at the party. Poor Rick was dressed in his normal clothes since I never was able to find him a shirt and I ran out of fabric for hats. I did have a brainstorm for next year though: It would be so perfect to dress him as Odlaw. I just need to find a good yellow and black striped tee and make him a yellow and black hat.

Raffle ticket numbers were called for small door prizes and names were drawn out of a bucket for the bigger prizes. We didn't win the grand prize, but at least the boys did win something.

They won a runner-up prize for coming in 2nd place on the W-word game where you had 30 seconds to come up with as many W-words as you could. We worked as a team with everyone shouting out words and I wrote them all down. In the end we had 14 words, which was good enough for 2nd place and a bag of freshly baked cookies from the bakery at Johnson Orchards.

We also got to eat some cute Waldo themed cupcakes.

And in the end I took Tyler into the bookshop to buy two more Waldo books to add to his collection at home. Guess how he spent the rest of his night...searching for Waldo!

July Favorites

Surprisingly, I actually did a decent job of posting pictures this month so I didn't have a ton of extra to choose my favorites from, but I found a few good ones that you haven't seen yet. At least not here anyway.

 

One of Kyle's favorite cereals is Lucky Charms because of the marshmallows. That's his favorite part and he always picks them out first. His other favorite is Froot Loops, so you can imagine his absolute glee when he discovered a combination of his two favorites.

This is a great picture of the boys, but what makes it even better is seeing Tyler with his Great Wolf Lodge wolf ears. He spent the entire month of July anxiously awaiting our trip and wore the ears almost every day.

I smile when I look at this picture because it speaks so much about the two things that were utterly consuming Tyler's brain for the entire month of July: collecting/playing Pokémon cards and looking forward to the Great Wolf Lodge trip.

 

Milk moustache. My post-workout protein drink in delicious...just ask Kyle. Vanilla protein powder, almond milk, half a frozen banana and sometimes a scoop of chocolate PB2.

A new set of babies for the month of July. They moved out of the nest while we were away on vacation. Now it's super quiet outside the kitchen window.

 

Cheese! Kyle thinks it's funny to give me extreme faces when I'm trying to take a picture of him.

I don't know who had it worse. Kyle got completely soaked with water balloons, while Tyler hardly got wet at all, but it was over 100 degrees outside that day, so perhaps it was a greater torture staying dry.

 

I love how excited Tyler was about getting shaved ice, but he picked out the strangest flavors. It was root beer float and pink lemonade or something crazy.

 

Selfie success.

Lessons Learned

Pearls of wisdom gained from our family vacation:

 

When using Groupon to book a hotel, actually call the hotel and make sure that Groupon has faxed over the information and that the reservation is indeed confirmed. Otherwise you'll show up at the hotel at 10:00 at night with no room, as they are already completely, 100% full.

If you're using the "freezer" section of a tiny hotel refrigerator to store ice cream....um, make sure you check that the temperature control isn't set to the warmest setting or you will have nothing but melty goop to serve to the poor child trying to celebrate his 3rd birthday, who by the way prefers ice cream over cake as a birthday treat.

It's true what they say: never take your retainer out of your mouth and wrap it in a napkin and leave it sitting on the restaurant table because you will forget about it, mistake it for garbage and leave it behind. I lost my retainer at the Great Wolf Lodge and I'm not going to say it's the most expensive mistake I've ever made, but I can certainly find better things to do with the $300 it'll cost for a replacement.

Priceline sucks. The end. Only use them if you have no standards for your hotel room, otherwise you might end up with a smoking room with only one bed. I'm sorry, but in what decade do we live in that smoking hotel rooms even exist!?! We spent 2 nights in a room that smelled like the inside of an ash tray, with our eyes burning and half of the family sleeping on the floor.