4th of July

We had a great day which included: sleeping in (until 8! - that never happens in our house), Hannah's swimming lessons, swimming and going on the waterslide, naps and a movie, Cafe Rio (a little taste of home), and fireworks at Coeur D'Alene lake.

Hannah is doing so great in her swimming lessons and is swimming on her own now!  

She is a trooper: at 9 am when she has her lessons it is usually still below 60 degrees in Spokane!  She doesn't mind the cold though.

Hannah and her friend Laney sporting the same swimwear.

With our friends the Hansens at the beach waiting for the fireworks.  

The show over the water was really incredible

The Hansens and the Klinglers; we're so glad these families are here for residency with us.

A note about Cafe Rio: being so close to the northern border, we rarely run into our friends from the country to the south.  That means that there are almost NO Mexican restaurants around here!  (Actually there aren't a lot of restaurants around here period, mostly just fast food and pubs.)  We did find a Costa Vida, but were sorely disappointed to find that they served plain old ranch dressing and plain old rice.  It was pretty gross.  There is a Cafe Rio in Coeur D'Alene so we decided to try it on the 4th of July. When we walked into the restaurant Hannah said, "Hey this place looks like home!" There was even a real Mexican working there, perhaps the first one I've seen since moving here. And just like Cafe Rio at home we ran into people we knew eating there too: people from our ward, people from the hospital, etc. the food was delicious too and the kids meals here are free. We love you Cafe Rio!

Looking for berries, berries for jam...

Some of the farms near us allow you to come pick your own produce for really amazing prices.  This weekend the strawberries were ripe so we took the kids up to pick a few.  We really wanted to make freezer jam since we miss stealing my mom's from her freezer.  Neither of the kids have any experience whatsoever with gardening/farming/etc and I don't think they even knew where strawberries come from so we thought it would be good for them to see where food really comes from.  The farmer gave us some crates to use to pick the berries in.  We thought that if we each filled a crate, we might have 5 -6 pounds, enough to make two batches of jam.

Jackson LOVED the entire experience.  He knew exactly what to do and carefully looked for red strawberries in the bushes.  He never seemed to get tired of it.  He likes to tell everyone we see that he put strawberries in his bucket.  Hannah liked it for about 30 minutes and then complained that she was too hot (it wasn't even 80 degrees).  We ended up filling 3 of our crates (which took a little over an hour).  Jack wanted to keep picking but the kids were done by then and I couldn't bend over to pick anymore with my big belly.

We went to have our strawberries weighed and were shocked when they weighed in at 17.5 pounds!  Good thing we didn't keep picking.  We went home and Jack helped me make freezer jam that night.  It turned out so great!  We have so many jars our freezer is full even after giving a few away.  I am guessing that we'll eat it all though.  Yum.