Grandma and Auntie Kay visit!

This week is Jeff's birthday (Wed.) and we had very special visitors this weekend. We had lots of fun playing with the girls. They loved all the extra attention! We went out to dinner to celebrate with Jeff and then had yummy cake. It was a great weekend but Samantha is teething and not sleeping well at night...so I am exhausted. Off to get stuff done so I can go to sleep!

Grandpa & Uncle Tim have been busy!!

Our New Playground.

Construction begins at the shop...

On the trailer.

Here it comes...down the road to our houseHere it is!Grandpa couldn't wait to see Danielle in it! This is before it's even unloaded from the trailer.

Daddy was a real trooper, he went in and checked it all out, here he is coming down the slide!

Daddy waving out one of the purple windows!
All of us in front of the ladder. What a good picture to remember how small the girls were when we got the playground! They will enjoy this for a lot of years.

Here are some pictures of our new playground in our back yard. That sentence sure doesn't do it justice, does it? Well, if you know my dad you know that he doesn't do anything little or halfway so.... He got the idea to build something for the girls in our backyard. After much searching and consideration he found someone selling the parts from a huge playground in Las Vegas. Next thing we know (after he got permission from us) he's got his trailer hitched up and he heads off the Nevada to bring it home. A few days later he returned with a trailer piled very high with these huge colorful pieces. These pieces are the same material that McDonalds, etc, have playgrounds made of, so he drove around and checked out their playgrounds for ideas. After a few other projects were finished he and Tim started working full time at putting this together. They spent at least a week and a half of full days (10+) hours/day and they created this playground that is probably 3 times the size of any playground you'll see at the fast-food restaurants. I believe the dimensions are like 40' x 16' and I don't even know how many feet high! Well, there is more to the story but I have a limited amount of time so I'll get to posting the pictures. A very big thanks to Grandpa and Uncle Tim. The girls and their friends are going to have so much fun with this.

Fun & Games

This afternoon a good friend had his 4th birthday party at a nearby pond. The pond is full of fish so everyone was invited to come and bring fishing poles. Jeff & Danielle had a blast fishing. I think they caught 3-4 fish and it was a great first time fishing for Danielle. There was also an obstacle course type game and Jeff got really involved helping and playing with all the kids. Here are a few pictures of Danielle. She loved it! I loved seeing her with a football under her arm. Just thought it was so cute. (I think I use the word "cute" in almost every post, don't I?!) The weather was beautiful and everyone had a great time.

Also, I just had to post a picture of one of the cutest cakes I've ever seen! The birthday boy is a big fan of Mater from the movie Cars. Isn't this great!? Mater's wheels are donuts, eyes are those green, gummy candies, tow bar was black licorice, etc....so creative, I thought.

Such a big girl now!

Samantha has been changing so much in the last few weeks. She is always wanting to be involved in whatever we are doing. She laughs so much and is getting very mobile. She gets around by crawling sort of an army crawl which is cute. The other day she sat up by herself for the first time and now she does it all the time. She just seems so much bigger, ready to play like a big girl, etc. Her eyes light up when Daddy walks into a room and her sister...Danielle is quickly becoming her very best friend. I'm soaking up my last few months of being her favorite person, the one she always wants when she's tired, the one who feeds her, and carries her everywhere. Soon she won't need me to get around at all, she'll be eating on her own, and she'll be so busy doing everything her sister is doing. Of course that's the way it should be so I'm enjoying this phase and looking forward to the next one at the same time.

More pictures from the weekend.

Trip to the ocean

One of our favorite annual trips is our trip to the coast over Labor Day weekend. This was an especially fun year because Danielle could hardly wait to sleep in her tent and go to the ocean!! It's so neat to experience life through her eyes. On the way there she had just woken up from her nap in the car and she said, "I'm tired, I want to go to sleep in my tent!". Hilarious!

The beach was incredible. The weather was overcast but it made for nice pictures. Danielle loved seeing her feet make footprints in the sand and Samantha loved eating the sand! I had no intention of putting her in the sand (we had her out in the jogging stroller) but then I wrote her name in the sand and wanted her to be in the picture. She immediately grabbed a handful and had so much fun with it that I just let her dig in. She did eat a little but not too much. I guess that's the joys of being the 2nd child, mom & dad relax a little and let you do things they would never let their 1st kid do.

Daddy and Danielle made some fun sandcastles. Danielle's favorite part was putting the feather in the top! When Danielle would talk about the ocean before our trip she thought that she would swim in it with her Daddy. Well...now she knows that it's very chilly and she didn't even like getting her feet wet! When we left she asked me, "Mommy, why is the ocean sad?" I was confused so I asked the questions back to her. She said, "Is it because I am leaving?". I told her to tell the ocean we would be back next year for more fun. I can't believe next year we'll have 2 little ones that can run around, scream, and play together. That was another thing Danielle loved about the beach. She could scream to her hearts content and no one told her to be quiet!

Hug Your Loved Ones

It's been awhile since my last post because my Uncle Dave passed away last week. I normally like to write about happy things on my blog but there is nothing happy about our loss. I'm sad for my Gram who lost her son, my mom who lost her brother, my Aunt Cathy who lost her husband of 35 years, and my cousins Jeff & Elizabeth who lost their dad at such a young age. My mom and I drove down to San Jose right away to be with my Gram and other family members during this time. It was good to be together but hard to be away from Jeff. I did get to see some family members that I hadn't seen it awhile which I did appreciate. The other special thing was a visit to see Father Jim. He is the priest that my Gram has known for a very long time, he married Jeff & I, and has always been like a part of our family. Danielle especially enjoyed the company of my "little" cousin David. They played piano (Mary Had A Little Lamb), hide-and-seek, and I also got a picture of her on his shoulders! So, we did make the most of our time together even though it was for such an unfortunate reason.

Now it's time to pack for our trip to the coast for Labor Day weekend. This is a trip we look forward to each year and we will really cherish this time together.