Oh what do you do in the Summertime...

We bought this little kiddie pool for Mckinley today. It's been so hot that it was nice to finally cool off in the water. She loves having her very own little pool to play in but would love to have some friends come and play in it too. We loved watching her roll around and jump in the water. She is getting to be less and less timid but still wants a towel every time she gets her face wet. Funny girl.



We canned some apricots for the baby on the way. 14 bottles! I hope she will like them because otherwise we will be eating a lot of apricot cake. With Mckinley we just pureed canned fruits and veggies in the blender. Hopefully this baby will like some of the same stuff.


Whenever summer was getting close in school we always got to have a read a thon. I remember looking forward to being a fifth grader ever since I was in kindergarten because fifth graders got to have a tent a thon where they were allowed to read their books inside a tent. My friend Erica and I got to have our own tent a thon in the new Wells Fargo building on the last day of Fifth grade and let me tell you, that was the life. David and I decided to have a read a thon with Mckinley last week and she loved everything about it. She looked through probably 10 different books. She didn't want to go to bed when it was time and she definately didn't want her daddy to take down our secret read a thon tent.



Last year, I worked so hard on making my flowers pretty around the yard and I forgot to take even one picture! This year, was not a good one for my hollihocks. (my favorite flower.) I think all of the extra moisture caused the roots to mildew or something. But I'm happy that I've been able to take the yard and make it my own. When we first moved in, there were no flowers whatsoever in the front or back yard. All of the flower beds had been covered with rocks. So, it has been a slow start but things are beginning to turn into the country garden I envisioned. There are still so many ugly areas in my yard, but hopefully they are getting smaller?



When David saw this picture, he laughed and said, "my daughter is so photogenic." I was in fact telling her to smile when I took this. hahaha.






We have been having fun with the vegetable garden this year although it has felt like such a slow start. It's still a work in progress and there are a few plants like my zucchinni plant that don't seem to change at all from day to day. But these are the ones I'm most excited about and my beets and carrots, which I didn't take a picture of. The top one is my salad garden. My sister used to eat lettuce sandwiches and I'm about to start doing that too. Our lettuce worked a little better this year because we didn't put it in direct sunlight which makes it bitter. The next picture is a tomatoe that will probably be ripe tomorrow. Hard to wait! And then there is a picture of one of our pumpkin plants. I decided to put a little pumpkin patch in the back corner of our yard where some of the grass had died last year. They weren't doing so good and there was not a single pumpkin until I forgot about leaving the water on them while we went to a bar b q a few days ago. They got watered for three hours and two days later there were pumpkins growing that seemed like they grew overnight!



This is the thing I'm most excited about from our garden this year. I wanted to have a strawberry patch like the one at a bed and breakfast by my parents house. This is a start at least. I can't believe that there are real strawberries growing! I love going back there and looking at them every day to see which ones are ripe. And they taste quite different from store bought strawberries. It's like candy growing in my garden. I love it.