Birthday Weekend

This has been a weekend of celebration! We started the weekend in Wamego for cousin Alex's birthday lunch, then we drove to Yates Center to celebrate my dad's birthday, and today we capped off the weekend with my grandma's 80th birthday party. We saw almost all of our family and ate an entire week's worth of food and dessert. Our hearts and our bellies are full!

Story time bubbles

Today was the last day of story time for the summer. We capped off the fun with everyone's favorite - bubbles.

A surprise oasis

I'm a little embarrassed to type this for fear that I'll surely be kicked out of the running for Mom on the Year, but today I took the kids to the city pool for the first time since Max was born. My poor children didn't even know that the city pool existed until today.

In my defense I had legitimate safety concerns about taking a baby and a one-year-old to the pool Max's first summer, and last summer could have still been a bit tricky, but I don't know what my excuse was for the first part of this summer. We'll just have to make up for lost time with lots a trips to the pool in the coming month because they LOVED it.

We stayed much longer than planned, and Natalie is now asking how those big kids learned to jump in the water face first. She's already excited for swimming lessons next year.

Photo Dump

Bikers

Santa was beginning to regret his decision to bring bikes for Christmas because the kids weren't even sort of figuring them out. The thought was that Max would learn to glide on a new balance bike and that Natalie could jump straight to a regular bike without training wheels since she could already glide so well. Well, a couple months ago Max was still riding the trike, and Natalie was riding Max's new balance bike. We occasionally tried Natalie's new bike, but we weren't getting anywhere, and we were very seriously considering putting training wheels on it.

Santa knew what he was doing though! Over the last month or so, both kids have suddenly taken off. Max walked on his bike for a few weeks before he picked up his feet to glide. Now he is gliding all over! Natalie started by just gliding on her bike. She started adding the pedals this week, and she's getting really good! These are the best videos we have of the bikers so far, but they keep getting better everyday!

Birthday Celebrations

We capped off Chris' birthday celebrations with dinner out at the Mexican restaurant this evening. Today is his actual birthday, but we've been celebrating for a few days. We partied with his family on Saturday and my family on Sunday. Despite the multiple celebrations, this is the best picture I have. The kids were too busy with their cheese dip to participate in the picture. It's been a fun birthday for us all!

A belated happy 4th

I'm late with the pictures, but we had a great 4th of July weekend in SEK. The kids were really into the poppers, parachutes, snakes, sparklers, and other small fireworks this year. We left the party before it got dark, so we missed the big fireworks, but we got to watch quite the show out the car windows as we drove home.