everyday at our house.

My Little Rock Star

Afternoon at the farm

I can't go back and do things chronologically or I fear I'll never catch up, so I'll just go with what JUST happened, to keep things current.

We visited Dale and Charlene Rhodes' farm yesterday (Dale is Jason's dad's cousin). - Their daughter, Sara, is a friend from Goshen, and she and her husband Dave have two girls around the ages of our kids. We saw them at the reunion, and she said we could come visit and see her dad feed the sheep! Well, as you can imagine, us city folk jumped at the chance to do that!

Dale and Charlene were so welcoming to us, and gave us the 4-star farm treatment. They showed us around and gave us some really interesting facts about their life there and the history of the farm itself.

This is Dale feeding the sheep as we watched.

My little city kids watching on in amazement...

Aunt Jeanette, Uncle Eddie, Auntie Mo-Mo and Eli also were along for the fun.

They had a llama who watched over the sheep and kept the coyotes and dogs away.

We got to see several pregnant cows too!

And they ended the tour with a ride on the 4-wheeler! Thanks so much Dale and Charlene! It was a perfect Iowa field trip.

Independent goof balls.

Wow I finally found my camera cord - I put it on top of our office armoire so I wouldn't lose it - and then I lost it for many weeks. Duh.

So, I uploaded 492 pictures and I'm now totally overwhelmed where to even start. So, I'm going to now just post this one silly picture of the kids on 4th of July. They are just being their fun selves, playing together, being goofy, and being 4 and 2.

I love these moments, and I love them. I'm so savoring this time in our life right now. It's a really precious time.

Back to the Beach

I love Pebble Beach. It is the most wonderful place in the summer for me. I feel in an entirely different world, emotionally, mentally and physically when I'm there. We took our first walk to pebble beach this week. And it was marvelous as always. We had the place to ourselves.

Noah eating a snack on the rocks.

Everyone is just so happy at the beach.

Noah spent pretty much all two hours we were there throwing rocks into the lake.

Dylan loves climbing on the rocks.



Hear the waves crashing and how peaceful it is there - in the middle of the city! Come join us sometime!

Recital

Dylan had her first ballet recital today. It was so darn cute. I couldn't keep the tears from flowing pretty much the whole time - halfway from laughing hysterically, halfway from not even believing she could possibly be doing this on stage. She's so old!!! :(

Here are the three best pics from the recital that I took - uggghh. Can you tell I was trying to watch first and photograph second? The rest you could not even tell where she was - so blurry. So, here are three terrible shots, but it will give you the gist. And you would be seeing the video, but we can't find the firewire cable...so no-go on that.

She's the red bird second from the right (of the little ones)

This is when they all do their own "free dance" and Dylan's (that she is very proud of and showed us at home) is to jump around in circles with her feet together and arms out. Looks a little more like a cross between a bunny and a penguin than a bird, but it was real cute.

The final bow. Everyone is supposed to put their hands up like a picture frame for the bow. Dylan, instead, was fervishly looking into the audience for us. She did not find us, and did not believe at first that we were actually there when I told her later.