Welcome, Raife

On August 1st, Brooke and Ryan welcomed their firstborn into the world.  Here are some first pictures of him while still visiting the hospital.

In case you haven't heard...

We have BLUE on the brain.

Magnolia and Boothe will soon have a baby brother!  Still working on the name, but we have until December to decide on that.  Christmas will be a whole lot merrier this year.

August 19th, 1981

That's when it all began.....

And today I turn 30!!!!

Thanks for all the birthday wishes!

So...where was I?

Now that the end of August is approaching, I thought I should wrap up the rest of what we did in July...

We picked blueberries a total of 4 times this summer.  Picking just under 50 pounds!  I froze a bunch once and the rest of the time we picked 6-10 pounds just to eat for the week.  And now the season is over and we will move on to fall raspberries, peaches, pears and apples.

The last 3 times we picked the girls each brought a very small bucket of their own to fill and add to our larger buckets or to fill and eat.  Boothe added berries of any and all colors to her bucket and then used more discretion when eating them, but this kept her from stealing the picked berries from mine and Dan's buckets.

Having her own bucket actually motivated Magnolia to pick and fill her bucket with BLUE blueberries!  She ate some but mostly just wanted to fill her own "Sal" sized bucket.  Have you read Blueberries for Sal?  It's one of our favorites.

 Their great-aunt Susan (Dan's mom's sister) sent the girls backpacks with their names embroidered on them.  They rarely take them off.  We are headed out to Colorado on the train (!) tomorrow for a family reunion and their backpacks are all packed with activities and snacks to take.

 Then one night at about 9pm, I was in the kitchen working on something, probably meal planning and Dan was painting the basement.  We decided to paint the playroom in the basement yellow and absolutely loved how it turned out.  Anyways, I heard squealing tires from outside, close by.  Our house sits about 5 houses away from a busy road/intersection so I hear squealing tires frequently as people are going too fast when the light turns red.  We also live right on a curve so cars also take the curve too quickly sometimes and tires will squeal.  But this night it was a little longer and louder than usual.  It was also followed by a substantial bang.  So I went to the front of the house to look out of the window and saw a car on it's side leaning up against a tree.  Moments later a police car showed up followed by about 7 more followed by police officers getting out of their cars and some of them running, chasing someone, pointing towards the direction of our house/backyard!  So of course we go out on the front porch to see whats going on.  The police were bringing in a police dog so we went out back to make sure our dogs weren't outside.  At first they thought the guy was in our garage but the dog led them through our backyard to our neighbors' yard behind us who happened to be out of the country for the summer.  Anyways, as we are standing on our back porch still spying on all of the action, they catch the guy in our neighbor's large outdoor trash can!  We couldn't see it, but we heard it all.  It was quite the exciting night.  I may have forgotten some details here so if so, Dan fill in the holes, please!

 This night of cops and robbers happened a few nights after we caught a mouse in our kitchen that didn't get caught in the trap but knocked completely silly by the trap and was now stumbling around in a circle in the middle of the kitchen floor.  Luckily Dan was home so we scooped him into a box and him and Boothe delivered him back to (as Boothe put it) "his mommy" who happened to be the neighbor's cat.  And the mouse incident happened a few days after we lost electricity for 3 days after a bad storm during hot July!  Monday morning 9am-Wednesday evening 6pm we had nothing.  Then the next day after a night of gorging ourselves on electrically we had the electricity shut off the next day from 9am-6pm because they were trimming trees along the power lines.  Two days later while out running errands my neighbor calls me and informs me that the transformer behind our house has caught on fire and caused a power outage once again plus a melted phone line and burnt toxic grass.  Luckily that was fixed within a few hours.

We took one, much less exciting than the rest of our July, trip to Silver Beach and the splash pad there.  So fun!

Dance Camp

This summer I signed Magnolia up for 1 activity a month.  June was Vacation Bible School at church, July was Dance Camp at Southold and we are in the middle of Tennis Camp at Leeper Park right now.  At the end of the week of dance the girls put on a short recital of all the things they learned during the week.  It was pretty cute even when Magnolia sat on the floor before running over to me during the first dance! ha  She must have had stage fright.

I love this girl!

 My little monkey who wants to be involved like her big sister so bad!

 I love this girl too!

Little Girls

My kids love 3 things.  Well maybe not ONLY 3 things, but on this Saturday night they were happy as clams with their baby dolls, Lawrence Welk and pretending to go to sleep on the rug.  They don't love to actually go to sleep, but they love to play "going to sleep".