Papa Love

The boys got some quality time with Papa last weekend, while all of the girls were at Rebecca's baby shower and James was at softball. They took a hike, got ice cream at McD's (a favorite activity with Papa!), and made fruit popsicles...

Grandma's visit

Grandma flew in for a quick little visit for Rebecca's baby shower. We met her and my parents for dinner her first night in town and then she came back to our house her last night. The boys were so excited to see her! (I was too, of course!) We went peach picking, but we also spent a lot of time playing at the house. I can only hope to be half as active and busy as she is when I'm nearing 90!

Millions of peaches

I guess if you go to the orchard with 4 adults and two kids, you can't really expect to come home with a reasonable amount of peaches! We were the proud owners of over 50 pounds of peaches. Luckily, James and I got an early anniversary FoodSaver from my parents, so we've frozen 2 peach crisp's worth of peaches, plus a lot of concentrate for peach lemonade or tea. We've gorged ourselves on fresh peaches every morning as well.

Brady was an expert tree climber!

Rudy, double-fisting the peaches!

Trying to pout

Rudy used to have the evil-ist evil eye of any kid I've seen. He's kind of lost it recently, though. He can't seem to hold a pouty, sad look for much more than a few seconds!

Smudgy beach night

We headed to the beach with friends on Friday night for an picnic dinner. I got some almost good pictures - apparently, there was a giant smudge on the camera lens, which is unfortunate because there was a beautiful rainbow.

Mom's fun with photo-editing

So, I found this new website (picnik) that allows lots of fun photo editing. I managed to entertain myself for a long time this morning while waiting for everyone to wake up. I wish I was one of those artistic-creative types who could actually create funky and fun picture edits and then still figure out creative stuff to do with them!

Rhythm

Rudy can't stop himself from dancing when he hears music!

Find him a team!

Brady got big-kid baseball bats and baseballs for his birthday. He's been practicing a lot!

Rudy's Ice cream faces

Baking??

I was cleaning up the kitchen and the boys kept coming in and asking to borrow ingredients. I found them on the front porch "baking" an "experiment"...in the end, I think their concoction had tequila lime marinade, salt, pepper, baking powder, sunflower seeds, dried habanero pepper, and vinegar. They tried to talk me into trying it, but I declined. Charlie, however, was very interested in it!

In the end, we decided to spread it around the veggie garden as a possible rabbit repellent!

Only child

Rudy enjoyed having some time as an only child while Brady was at Oma and Papa's house. (He'll get his camp week after Brady goes back to school.)

He got to jump on the furniture, with no bossing around by his big brother:

He got to bake cookies with James

He got to pretend to be Mommy...which was a full day's entertainment!

We played whatever he wanted. I love that Brady and Rudy are such great friends, but it's gotten to the point where they don't always want me to play with them, so it was really fun to have him all to myself...he's a very different kid without his big brother around!

Charlie

She's still really hard to take a picture of...she's just so black!! She is still a great puppy - very relaxed. Her favorite game is to chase the boys and her towel around the house. We haven't had much luck with fetch yet.



One of the few times she's gotten into trouble...I moved her crate upstairs and had put her jar of peanut butter on the stairs to go up on the next trip. I got sidetracked and found her a couple of minutes later with the jar on its side, happily licking away at the peanut butter...

Camp OmaPapa

Brady recently spent a week with my parents at the beach. As usual, they kept him very busy! Here are a few of the pictures...