School's Out for Summer!

The fundraiser for Kara's t-ball team was selling tickets to a Rockies game and letting teams walk around the field before the game.  Kara had never been to a real baseball game, but she was excited!  It was Dad's first time down on field level at Coors Field (and Kara's, obviously).  It was a fun experience, and the Rockies even won (beating the NY Mets 4-3)!

Kara wrapped up her first year of real school at the end of the month.  She's excited to be a first grader next year!  She's got a busy summer planned with several camps lined up.

Emily is a pretty mild-mannered 3-year old.  She has the occasional melt-down, but her worst days are nothing compared to Kara when she was about the same age.  Emily is continuing to develop her voice and is getting better at communicating what she wants, which isn't always easy with a big sister like Kara who is very opinionated herself.  One of her favorite things to do is to sing the alphabet song to us.  She still has a little trouble with the middle (L-M-N-O come out ellam minnow), but she's getting better.  She can pretty easily count to 20 and can identify all the numbers up to 10 (though she sometimes gets 6's and 9's confused).  All in all, she's a pretty awesome kid.

Early May, we got out and started up our garden for the summer.  We planted a couple different kind of tomatoes, zucchini, beans, and pumpkins.  We'll see what comes up!

Link to pictures

Another Summer Comes to an End

We crammed some end-of-summer fun in with Grandma and Grandpa - one morning we met them at the Boulder County Fair and another we met up at the Broomfield Bay water park.

The Fair day was quite hot (you can tell by Emily's picture...), but both girls enjoyed seeing the farm animals, and even saw their first clown show!  Emily was a little apprehensive, but quickly started to enjoy herself.  And Kara was cracking up!  Kara also got to enjoy some carnival rides with Grandma and Grandpa while Emily went home for a nap.

We only got to Broomfield Bay (small local pool/water park) one day this summer (same as last summer) and both girls had a blast!  It was a bit chilly for the adults, but we powered through.  Kara couldn't get enough of the big water slides, and Emily made Dad go down the medium slide over and over and over....

August also brought lots of bounty from our little garden.  We got several rounds of beans, lots and lots....and lots of zucchini, and yummy tomatoes!  Our carrots were very sad and the watermelons were a complete no-show (maybe we should have weeded?!), but we plan to garden again next year.  The girls really enjoyed watching everything grow.

Emily went with Mom and Kara to the hair salon one day and got her first salon experience.  Ms. Rose was very nice and shampooed Emily's hair and gave her a good blow dry.  Emily just thought it was the coolest thing.

Emily is going through an independent phase.  She wants to do everything herself (including getting dressed, getting into the bath, reading books) and gets very irritated if someone tried to do something for her or makes her do something before she's ready. It has been a little tricky to get her to do things sometimes...

Kid quotes:
Emily: "No thank you, I'm playing toys" when we asked her to come to dinner one night.

Link to pictures