Sowing the Seeds of Love

a couple of weeks ago we planted our very first garden. annie - as you may recall from the theme of her 5th birthday - is garden obsessed. she loves everything about gardens and has been asking us over and over again if we can have one. between my black thumb and addison's lack of motivation we just kept putting it off. and before i get in trouble, let me just insert here that i, too, had a serious lack of motivation. finally though, addison was hit with a giant gale-force gust of motivation and took us to the store to find a garden box, dirt, plants and seeds.


annie helped build the box and then jasper drove his gator to bring over the bags of dirt. it was almost like when we visit mama and papa at the farm and help mama pull weeds or find rocks and put them in the gator.



annie had fun burying her legs in the cool dirt and and helping spread it around...

then the two punks commenced the "stomping of the divots dirt"...(little "Pretty Woman" reference for you there)


and at last, we have ourselves a little garden, featuring carrots, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, basil and tomatoes. wish us luck!

The Little Mermaid and her Brother

while annie has officially mastered the art of swimming without assistance, coming up for air, using her arms to take actual strokes and - her favorite - jumping off the diving board, jasper continues to find swimming pools very suspicious and possibly deadly.

i think ever since last summer when jasper jumped off the edge when i wasn't looking and impaled his chin in to my forehead, he just hasn't been too keen on the jumping-in-the-pool-thing.

he'll get there.

here's annie showing her skills. please note how she holds her arms out as she prepares for her "dive". it's my favorite.

Celebrating a Nice Day

A couple of weeks ago, we had the first nice day in what felt like months. the sun was out, we only needed light jackets and the wind was minimal. and so, with our dobbers decidedly not down, we took off to the 7 Acre Wood to wear the kids out play.

this place is great. for 5 bucks you get a petting zoo, a playground, mini-golf, a zip-line, an old-west play town, a puppet theater and they even do pony rides. not only that, but on the day we were there, a baby goat was born! pretty exciting stuff. wink. but really, though, the kids love it and that makes it fun for us, too.

so the zip line really won the day as far as what we spent the most time doing. once the kids figured it out, they couldn't stop. they say that adults can't ride on this zip line, but don't think for a second addison and i weren't tempted. i mean, what's the worst that could happen - they stick us in the western-town jail? yeah, yeah, don't worry, we didn't try it...but check out the fun the punks had: