August

Mollie lost that second tooth! We listened to "All I want for my birthday are my two front teeth."

Allie, always having fun.

Happy 7th Birthday, my sweet Mollie!

Mollie can now read her own birthday cards.

Mollie celebrated her birthday with her first sleepover party. She wanted to do art with her friends. Mollie loves art! We filled squirt guns with paint and each girl got to paint a canvas to take home.

Scott brought home Toy Story Mania for the girls to play on the Wii. Fun!

Ended the night with watching Ponyo. Mollie would not look away for any of the pictures I tried to take.

On the day of Mollie's birthday we headed out for a family picnic and enjoyed perfect weather.

After lunch we fed the ducks. Turns out they don't mind mayo on bread.

Mollie spent time doing one of her favorite summer activities.

Allie also did one of her favorite activities.

Summer came to an end all to quickly. We had theme weeks, golfing and bowling, swim lessons, art, time with grandparents and family and friends. We said good bye to our neighbors and welcomed new ones.

And now we start the school year.

July

Our summer has been unusually cool. Not that that's bad! Unless you are a tomato. I was so excited to get my first tomatoes I had to take a picture. Plus, if I told anyone how small my red ones were no one would believe it. So here you have it. I bought a variety called "Sweet Pea" and won't be doing it again. Picking tomatoes the size of peas is not satisfying. (Here is Aug I'm still waiting for my regular red tomatoes to turn red!)

We have some solid dirt. It's good dirt; we can grow things. But it's solid. Scott's dad came over to push down on the front end of the rototiller to get the soil turned for sod.Got the grass in! The yard is starting to look like a backyard!

In the back corner of the yard nothing would grow. The fence would cast constant shade. We sold the small toddler crab sandbox and Scott designed and built this box for the girls. It's full of 19 cubic feet of beach sand. Fun! Final touch with some pavers that look similar to the porch to edge the grass.
Continued Art Week with some tie dying. We did a bit of everything for the girls to dye for year-round color.

I even made some socks for Scott and myself.

The girls tried their hand at pointillism after learning about it from a children's classic art book.

Just before summer started we said good-by to our fish Jingle Bells. He had a good year with us. A couple months later we were ready for another fish. She's also a betta. Girls named her Goldie.

We remembered to hang the flag for 4th of July.We also had a sports week. There were times in my parents' kiddie pool. Did some bowling. (A local alley had a free kids club where the kids could have a free game and shoe rental every day. We went a lot.) And we took our first trip to Golfland.

Almost the same picture, but I love the look on the girls. Ready to go!

June

Here goes - a summer recap!

The day after Mollie got out of school for vacation we left for Bakersfield to visit Darren and Becky. While we were gone our butterfly pets started coming out of their cocoons. Here is one of them after we released them into the garden.

We celebrated Father's Day altogether as a family. People traveled from all around the country and world - amazing to get us all in one place at the same time! Greg had been traveling in Indonesia and as you can see, the girls really missed playing with him.

Great Grandpa has a good sense of humor too.
During Art Week at home we tried bubble painting. I had paint in pans with dish soap and the girls laid paper on top of the bubbles they blew up. Didn't really turn out the way I had hoped, but they had fun once they figured out now to suck the painty soap up the straw.

Mollie had been taking dance classes for 4 1/2 years and was finally old enough to take part in the Big Show. The dance studio rented the Center of Performing Arts in downtown San Jose for family and friends to enjoy. She did a beautiful ballet dance to "When You Wish Upon A Star."