Limited Attention

Emma was gung ho about "helping" me make a skirt. Help lasted until about the middle of the project, then she got sucked into some tv show. This is her watching tv as I looked to see if it fit. I think she no longer cares, but "we" did make a skirt together. (Thank you Keira for the tutorial)
Rotten child. She wasn't happy about any of her clothes choices and wanted to wear a pink skirt of Lily's. Umm, Lily barely fits in the skirt, Emma was certainly not going to fit. She was willing to wear jeans under the skirt to make it modest, but it's going to be in the 90s today. I had to explain that layering in hot weather is not a good idea. If you look closely at the fabric, the owls are wearing hats and scarves. Not exactly "Summer" fabric, but the pink met Emma's criteria (which is a little weird, she doesn't normally push for pink).

Crazy for Climbing

I finally remembered to take a camera when I took the kids to the climbing wall. Lily is tenacious enough to keep trying and make it to the top of the "easy" wall.
Emma decided to go right for the hard stuff today and made it up as well.
Jack practically runs up the wall. He is awfully quick and enjoys figuring how to get to the top.

Exploring *contains scary pictures*

I happened to be at one of my favorite parks and the kids found a small snake. I didn't know what kind it was, all I knew was that it didn't have a rattle. Never the less, I didn't let the kids too close.
After we saw the small snake, I kept taking pictures and even got a couple cute ones. Then on the way back to the car I saw a BIG snake.
I may or may not have freaked out when I saw this one. It was at least 4 feet long, in my head it was much larger more like 10 feet.
I think I'm not going to head over to that park for a little while. It may take a little while to recover from that.

As American As...

I asked Michael what he wanted for dessert on the 4th. He said, "What is more American than apple pie?" I'm not great with pies but I figured that Google is my friend and this pie turned out great.

Easy Apple Pie

Ingredients

• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• 8 Granny Smith apples - peeled, cored and sliced

Directions

1. Melt butter in a sauce pan. Stir in flour to form a paste. Add white sugar, brown sugar and water; bring to a boil. Reduce temperature, and simmer 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, place the bottom crust in your pan. Fill with apples, mounded slightly. Cover with a lattice work of crust. Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the crust. Pour slowly so that it does not run off.
3. Bake 15 minutes at 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Reduce the temperature to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C), and continue baking for 35 to 45 minutes.

July Fourth

We keep our 4th activities pretty simple. We planned on meeting up with our neighbors for a potluck dinner and then head to another neighbors for dessert and fireworks. Right about the time that we started dinner, a storm blew in.

Thinking that the rain would blow through, we continued with dinner inside instead of out. Fireworks kinda happened, the dads put in raincoats and the kids ran in and out of the garage watching. Everyone was drenched by the end of the night, but it was a lot of fun hanging out with neighbors.

Entertaining Cousins

It's crazy how quickly times flies when you're having fun. We had a great visit with Gabrielle and Quinn (cousins) they are welcome to come back anytime!!
We went to the Rec Center to go rock climbing and swimming, the Butterfly Pavillion, and canoeing. Michael took the older kids on a ghost tour up in Estes Park as well.

This is at Union Reservoir, Michael did take the kids to the river a couple times.

Papillion

"Mom, what's the French word for butterfly?"

Emma, my Parisian tomboy, caught a butterfly and wanted to keep it as a pet. Thankfully she decided to release it into the wild, aka, my neighbor's yard.