July 4th

We decided to spend the 4th at Grandma Kathi's new house.  Not only does she have the sweetest house but it overlooks the golf course and it is so quiet and peaceful it makes for some relaxation time for me.

First I'd like to give you a little tour of Grandma's house because she worked really hard on it and it turned out beautiful.

We decided to head to the pool first.  It was an overcast day at a perfect temperature of about 95 so we were excited to spend some time cooling off in the pool.  It took the girls and the adults for that matter a few minutes to get used to the water as it was a bit cold. Once we were in it for a while though it was quite refreshing.

We spent about 30 minutes in the pool and all got bored so we got out and walked back to the house.  where we then decided to have a snack out on the back patio before the girls needed to take their nap.
The view is so nice and Brooke like to climb over the wall onto the grass on the other side.

It started to rain so we took the snacks inside where I was able to bet some really cute pictures of Charlotte in her chair.

After the girls woke from their nap the great grandparents and Uncle Mike came over for dinner.  By then the sky cleared up and the sun came out and there was a cool breeze to enjoy. 

Of course Charlotte got terribly messy at snack time so I had to give her a bath in Kathi's sink.  I didn't have a change of clothes for her so we stole one of grandma's t-shirts.  Charlotte then had a blast helping herself to the cherries in Grandma's fruit bowl.

After Dinner came dessert and fireworks and what photographers call "dream lighting."

We had the all American Apple Pie with Vanilla ice cream for dessert and the girls LOVED it.  I'm not even sure if Ben got a single bite.

We decided to just do the small fireworks this year with Brooke being so young and it being her first experience.  Of course she loved the sparklers.

 Ben has a new title...Family Piro.

 

And that concludes our 4th of July.

Slip 'n Slide!!!

Before Christian left to his dad's for the Summer he had a big sleep over with about 3 of his friends. So Ben thought it would be fun to set up the slip n slide for the kids to have some fun.  This one comes with a board you have to run and jump on and keep your balance while you slide.  the boys finally got it about 3 tries into it.

Brookey of course had to stop her paying in the water to grab a snack.

Once Christian and his Friends got a hold of this thing there was no slowing them down.

This is his "mom...stop taking pictures of me" look.

It's Brookey's turn to get a running start...and she doesn't go very far but you get the point.

By the end of the day the boys were wiped out and the grass was destroyed.  But it was so much fun and well worth it.

Our Fruit Trees

So it's become a rather fun event in our family when our trees are finally ready for us to eat the fruit from them.  Brookey loves to pick the fruit.  She goes outside at least twice a days to pick our white nectarines and apricots which I must say are so sweet they taste like candy. 

Our apricot tree is still a baby so it only gave us about 10 apricots this year...but they were sweet ones.  I remember my gram having a huge apricot tree in her back yard with an enormous strawberry patch under it and in the spring it always looked so beautiful. 

Our White Nectarine tree is as old as Brooke so it gave us hundreds of nectarines this year.  We were probably eating about 20 a day between the family and they lasted 2 months.

Um nom nom...me want fruit!

On nice cool days of 95-100 we will lay a blanket in the back yard and play and eat and play and eat.  The girls will usually fight over playing with my phone and most of the time come out laughing with each other.  It's so heart warming seeing them play with each other.