Catch Up Time

We now have church at 9:00, so I have decided that I will update this blog each Sunday with my extra time in the afternoon. I want this blog to serve as a digital scrapbook, since I don't do any real scrapbooking, but if I want that, I better spend some time with it.

So I'm going to spend the next few weeks catching up from September until now.

In the fall, we...

celebrated Caroline's half birthday with a traditional half donut,

had a fun visit from Cousin Luci and family,

including Grandma Diamond,

played some interesting dress up games,

and spent lots of time in the beautiful mountains.

The End. Next week I'll talk about Halloween. Man, I'm behind.

Happy Autumn!

We had a great time celebrating the first day of autumn last week.



Lydia and I went for a walk around Silver Lake, a most beauteous place. (There really is a lake. This picture just doesn't show it.)



Luckily, I hadn't cleaned out the car in a while and there was a sweater in there for Lydia because it was about 20 degrees colder in the mountains than it was at our house. I, on the other hand, got to run around the lake in flip flops and short sleeves because there was nothing warm for me in the car. I wasn't the only one who forgot something warm to wear, though. One kid was wearing a bathrobe. Who carries around a bathrobe in their car?

Lydia now has strep throat and when I look back at these pictures of dazed eyes, I wonder if she may have been starting to get sick that day. Poor girl.

Happy autumn!

Summer Vacation

Our foreign exchange student from Germany has arrived! We're having a fabulous time. You can read about it on my other blog, www.thrilledbythethought.com

For here and now, I'm going to catch up on summertime.

We got back from a fabulous trip to Lake Almanor in California with Ryan's family. There was fun all around.

There was time for fairy dancing on the lawn,

snuggling with Daddy/Uncle Ryan,

swimming in the warm lake (it's actually blue, but looks brown here),

dressing up,

eating popcorn and watching movies with cousins,

lounging in the hammock with cousins (they started out loving it but were all screaming bloody murder by the time I got there with the camera.),

and stealing all of cousin Luci's stuffed animals for some snuggle time.

Then it was off to Tracy for a short weekend with my family. We spent an entire day in the pool with cousins. And Lydia learned that she needs to keep a close eye on her food when Great Grandpa Middleton is around. (a lesson I, myself, learned at about her age.)

Oh how we love...

...messy summer days!

Happy 4th!

Ok. I don't even deserve to have this blog anymore. It is receiving no attention from me, poor thing. Too much has happened in the past 2 months to sum up here, so I'm just going to skip it and start with July.

Our Independence Day was a blast. We got to ride on a float, go to a festival and get VIP seating at the Sugar House fireworks. All in all, a very satisfying, American day.

Happy birthday America!

In other news, we are having a foreign exchange student from Germany come live with us. She will be here next month. We adore her to pieces already and can't wait to meet her in person.

I will try to update more often than every two months, but if you feel like it, you can always come check out my other blog, www.thrilledbythethought.com. It gets more attention than this poor, pathetic red headed stepchild blog right here.

California Trip Part 2

We left Lydia with willing (I think) grandparents for a night and wandered down to Monterey to celebrate our 5th anniversary.

We explored downtown Monterey, turning corners to find gardens and meandering through historical buildings we didn't know existed.



We spent some lovely time on the beach, but found that the sun does not set on the horizon there, much to our dismay. Monterey's ocean is a bay, not the end of the world, so the sun sets over a hill dotted with obscenely large houses. Not very romantic.




We walked a couple miles through the canning, fishing and shopping districts.




And we got up close and personal with some seals or sea lions (I don't know the difference) on a glass bottom boat tour. We aren't sure what the purpose of the glass bottom was. We didn't see anything through the glass except seaweed. Did you know you can also see seaweed on the beach? We're really happy we paid to see it through a murky glass bottom boat.

This seal/sea lion had just battled two other seal/sea lions and gained the title of "King (or Queen) of the Buoy" for a moment.

Trip to California Part 1

We had a fabulous time in California 2 weeks ago. The trip began like this:



But quickly turned into this:

These were Lydia's very first rides. We thought she would get nervous, so Ryan went with her on the first ride (what a good sport- he barely fit). She didn't need him at all, so we set her free on a few others. She was a natural!