sweet summertime

OH what do you do in the summer time when all the leaves are green?

We.................

We Play in our Backyard!
We got anna a sandbox for her birthday. She loves it, but boy is it a mess! The sand sticks to everything. I have to keep telling anna that she is not a chicken and that she doesn't need rocks and sand to break down her food for her. She doesn't believe me.
My sister jill is staying with us a for a few weeks (she's 14). She took a lot of these great pics - thanks jill we love having you around!
We ride bikes.
Anna is so funny with her helmet. She doesn't know how to move her head with it on and often just moves her eyes. What a goof! She's sure cute in it though! We got a bike trailer from a friend and use it all the time, anna loves her buggy. It also doubles as a stroller. I took her zachie for a walk in it twice yesterday. Both times zachie fell asleep on anna's shoulder. The second time was cuter because Anna fell asleep too. What cute friends!
I go to work.
I work a lot in the summer because I fill in when people take vacations. Naturally, summer is the prime vacation time (that and the holidays) so I've been working a bit. My dear friends Jesse and Britt Smith watch Anna for me. I call it the Brittney Acadamy because Britt introduces anna to all sorts of new things. She had the kiddos color the other day and anna loves it. She really likes to throw the crayons we've learned though..........no good anna, no good.
Britt also fills this pool with different things for a "sensory experience" Last time it was filled with pasta. Anna loves to lounge in the pool. She puts her arms up over the sides (see above) like she's just chill'n. I love it. i don't know what I would do without britt.

We Play at the Park
This is Richard and Zachie at the cool park by our house. We actually have 4 parks within 1 mile of our house, which is awesome. We've made different names for them: cool park (snyder/sunset park), Lame Park (murdock park), Secret park (its a secret), stella olsen park (okay, no nick name for that one). Anyways, on my run we usually stop at at least 2 of these parks and one additional park that is actually like 2 miles away. We went up to cool park on monday for FHE and took some family pictures. Our camera was too fuzzy to get anything good (I scratched the lens), but Britt got some good shots!


We Eat Good Food
I love watermelon. I can eat a whole one in 2 days. Luckily Anna also likes watermelon so I now don't eat the whole thing by myself. We also love corn on the cob. Anna was helping me shuck the corn and snuck away with a raw one for a little pre-dinner snack. I guess its not toxic to eat a whole cob of raw corn becuase she's still alive! Anyways, the garden not amazing this year, but we are eating a lot of fresh garden lettuce.
We don't get enough Sleep!
Anna wakes up at the crack of dawn (literally, when the sun comes up she's up). It's really annoying and I'm getting really tired. I guess I could put her to bed later than 7:00 - but I really enjoy my evenings of freedom! Anyways, anna sleeps wierd now, we like to go peek at her before we go to bed. This is what we found last week (above). She's breathing through the slats funny girl! The picture below is from our Redwood trip. I think I'm still trying to recover the sleep robbery that happened on the trip. Even though she was up most of the night, I still couldn't help but snuggle her in her sleep in the morning.
We go to parties!

This is Anna and Aunt Jill at the Salem Hospital Picnic. They have one every year. This year I was happy to take my own kid instead of borrowing my friends! We ate pasta salad and hamburgers and played around. Jill loved the churros. I dont like those.
They had this big shark blow up slide. We took anna down that thing probably 10 times. She kept signing "more" after we would get down. She's a bit of a thrill seeker I think!
There was also this long crawl through tunnel that she loved. It was actually pretty cool. But there was this 5 yr oldish kid at the end that kept putting balls into it. I had to be a mean mom and tell him to stop because I had a baby coming through. That made me feel old. Oh well, Anna loved it!

We enjoy our friends!
Summer would stink if we didn't have friends to share it with! We are so glad we live where we do and that we have aunt jilly staying with us!