Fire Station

After much anticipation,
on Kacin's side,
the time came to visit
The Fire Station.

We had a pleasant tour
from four friendly firefighters
and saw the inside of the fire station,
the firefighter garb,
and the firetruck--
the firetruck with the 110 foot ladder.
Impressive.

Fireman Tony climbed to the top for us.

The boys (mine and our neighbor friends)
were thrilled with the experience
and inquisitive
and absolutely enthralled.

Kacin was sure
that he would get to turn on the lights and drive the firetruck.
Why did I even doubt and try to prepare him for the worst?
With his faith,
and those glasses and that face,
Of course,
he
did.

Which made for some big smiles.

Picnic and Pianos

Eric's work held a company picnic,
Probably the best picnic I've ever been to.
Free food and LOTS to do.

Plus ice cream, bubbles, video games, and miniture golf.

We stayed the whole time

and came home with sunburns.

To end the day, we went on a date.

A little dinner and a search for

8 Pianos.

City of Everett put pianos, decorated by local artists,

around the downtown area for anyone to come and play.

On our quest, we found 5 of the pianos and one Goodwill store.

After the Goodwill, we continued on our way

with one hat, one red necklace, one visor, and one donkey-head watch.

We cool.

Zoo

Eric took a day off.
We went to the zoo, zoo, zoo
and spent some time with the
Elephants . . .

Komodo dragons . . .

Orangutans . . .

Birds . . .

They (not me) had the best time feeding the birds. The birds flew all around (too many of them) and you held up a stick for them to eat from and they'd come land on you (so I made a quick exit).

Penguins . . .

Kyler the Model . . .

He asked me to take his picture again.
Who even taught him to model like this?

A good day at the zoo, zoo, zoo.

Pictures and Explanations

Kyler loves reading. His favorite books to read are Geronimo Stilton Books. He is excited every time we go to the library and begs for extra reading time before bed. His excitement is finally starting to rub off onto Kacin who loves reading his own just-right books.

Kacin is super excited for Kindergarten. We did some back to school shopping and got him a backpack. He didn't take it off for two days. And kept bombarding me with questions about kindergarten, when it will start, does he really get to go each day, etc. We have a month until the first day and he will be at a montessori school again.

Disgusting. We were eating some grapes at lunch the other day and pulled this grape off the bunch. Luckily I inspected it before popping it into my mouth. There was a crusty, old bug stuck to it. (Thank you, Eric. I do wash my grapes. However, I do not soak them or power wash them. This one was stuck to another grape in the bunch and that bug was well stuck. The boys and I were just excited that we could take a cool picture of it. So yah.)

We visited a petting farm last week. Kyler's favorite time was spent with this goat. I guess it gets bullied by the other goats and they won't usually let him eat with them. Kyler spent a lot of time with one of the volunteers helping to feed and protect it.

It's hard to read from the pictures, but the sign says "Welcome Home Dad." We survived another week of Eric traveling. We weren't happy about him going (Kyler cried during church the morning E left), but we tried to be supportive and held up just fine. There was just one incident that left me perfectly frightened for sleeping by myself--I closed my door when I went to bed at night and woke up to the sound of the doorknob turning and the door opening. I thought it was just Kacin. But no. Nothing there. The only logical explanation at 3am was a ghost. I didn't sleep so well the rest of the night. (The logical explanation in the morning was the window fans turning on and off because of their automatic setting. That's what I'm telling myself anyways. . . )

We are all just very glad he is back home hiking, wrestling, and baking rolls with us.

They were supposed to be pulling weeds in the garden. Which they did. But they also managed to cover eachother in the dirt and weeds. You can see the stuff they poured on eachother in the second and third pictures. Oh, boys.

We've been trying some different forms of art this summer. A lot of them are things I learned in one of my college courses (I just loved studying early childhood education). This art project consisted of watered down tempera paint and a little rubbing alcohol in spray bottles and lots of paper. We had such a fun time getting messy and experimenting with colors.

With Scissors and Glue

Each month we read all the stories from the new Friend magazine
and then drop the magazine into my church bag
to color in and peruse during Sacrament meeting.
I finally got tired of the stack of mags filling my already full bag.
But sometimes I feel guilty about silly things

and one of those silly things was tossing the magazines in the recycling.
So my solution,
(which I'm sure has been done by many before me but I still think it's brilliant)
was to transform them into
books.
The boys and I have been cutting pictures and words out of the magazines
and creating mini-collages on 4X6 index cards.
The pages are a mixture of pictures, quotes, or phrases.

We tried to give each page a different topic.
Kacin was a little stuck on the topic "things that make me happy".

one of Kacin's pages on left, one of Kyler's pages on right

Then we put them into mini-cheapo-photo albums
and voila!

We have two simple, any-age, take anywhere, uplifting books.

I love that we can take out, add, or move around the pages as needed
and the boys are so proud of the pages they made.
I hope they stay this excited about it and the books get used often.