First Day of School

Rainy Day

The perfect excuse for umbrellas:

Addy's Seat

He insisted on sitting in big sister's ride:

Popsicles!

We made some homemade lime-ade popsicles to celebrate the end of summer:

Birthday Cupcakes

from Polly

Water Sprite

Did You See Us on TV?

3rd row seats to the Nats game

Dog Days of Summer

The kids getting a little silly in the heat:

Fancy Hair

Girl Scout Gelato

From last week's girl scout meeting:


Park clean-up:



Followed by Splendora's. We arranged for the girls to have a tour. Here they are in the deep freeze:


The owner had the dates mixed up and was late. She felt terrible about it, so she let the girls make their own batch of gelato:


Excited girls doing a train around the kitchen:

Champs!

Abby's swim team ended the season first in their division and had a great championship meet at UVA. Abby did a fantastic job in the huge pool. Here is her name in lights:



She came in 5th in this race (freestyle) and 3rd in her backstroke, improving her time by more than 6 seconds. Here she is receiving her time improvement ribbon at the awards banquet on Sunday:



And her championship trophy:




She's building quite a collection. No more swimming for this summer, but she has decided she wants to swim on the fall team which starts in September "so I can keep getting better." :)

The Perfect Summer Day

Although we had few plans for last Sunday, we ended up having a packed day that was just perfectly summer. We started out at Mint Springs for our congregational picnic. The kids loved swimming in the lake, which was the perfect temperature and not too crowded:




After a brief stop to be "king of the rock":


We headed to Chiles Peach Orchard for an afternoon snack. Kevin and I indulged in the "Dondae":



While Benji plowed through some peach ice cream:


And Abby enjoyed a milk shake:


We finished up at Crozet Pizza for dinner:


And went home very satisfied.

Splash Park Bound

Fairy Tea Party

We held off on Abby's birthday party for a couple of weeks to allow her best friend Julia to make it back to town. This also gave her plenty of time to dream up the elaborate party that she wanted. She settled on a "fairy tea party" theme, so we ran with it:




The girls decorated their own fairy wings and made magic wands:






After they were "fairy-fied" we moved to making the food for the tea party:




I took the girls outside for a fairy treasure hunt while Kevin cleaned up the HUGE mess they made cooking and set up for the "tea" portion of the tea party:


Then we moved back inside and the girls created their own fairy punch:


Here's Abby adding the secret ingredient (pop rocks - the girls said the punch tasted like "candy soda")



By the time we got to cupcakes, everyone was sick of sugar, but Abby enjoyed having the birthday song sung to her:


At party's end, the girls made their way downstairs for dress-up while waiting for parents to arrive:


Definitely a lot of work, but Abby was thrilled with the party. Just wait - next year she will want us to put on a circus...