Happy Birthday Rachel

Happy 5th Birthday Rachel

My Rachel is turning five today. I can't believe it. Rachel is my always enthusiastic, funny, spicy, cuddly, and gung ho girl. As Rachel says herself, as she said yesterday as she was looking forward to her birthday, "I am so exciting!" Here are some pictures of Rachel now and from a baby.

I love you so Rachey!



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Camping Trip

Here are a few pics from our camping trip. One thing I love about camping is that when you get home having an imperfect home seems blissful and clean and luxurious.


 

 

 

 

 

Summer Pictures

Here are some new pictures.

This first one (below) are some vegetables from our garden I harvested for dinner last night. This is the first year I got celery to grow. Grow it from good starts and give it lots of water! It's growing wonderfully. The neat thing is I can take off just what I need and it keeps growing. I'm always wasting celery from the store because I don't get to it before it wilts.
 


The following pictures are from our day today. We went driving near Indian Heaven Wilderness and were going to pick Huckleberries. But, there was record snowfall this year and they aren't even close to ripe yet.
 

Natalie with hats on.
 

Trees near Indian Heaven Wilderness
 

A beautiful, fire red wildflower.
 
There were actually a lot more mosquitoes elsewhere (besides by the lake). My husband went here (without me) last year when I was pregnant, camping with the older girls, and that year there weren't any mosquitoes.


Girls playing by Mosquito Lake.
 

OK. So this is a Mosquito that tried to eat our family for lunch. These were the most aggressive Mosquitoes I've ever been around. I was out of our truck two minutes looking at wildflowers (in the noon day sun) and when I got back in the car I was itching all over. I thought I had come across plants I was allergic to, but soon the welts started appearing on my body. The next stop was for five minutes and I probably got fifteen bites in that time period. I didn't figure, especially in the middle of the day, five minutes was worth putting bug spray on. I was wrong! At the next stop, we had lunch and put bug spray on immediately. They still got a few bites in on spots I missed and tried to bite through my clothes.

I suppose I wouldn't have minded so much if I was an average person. But, alas, I have allergies. I'm not allergic to all mosquitoes, just certain ones, I guess. And I was allergic to these. My bites turned to welts, from a width of a nickel to the width of a silver dollar. I got two bites just above my eye and my husband said I looked like I had been punched in the eye. I said I wanted to go for the day. It was probably good there were no Huckleberries, so we could head home. I think I will try going again in a few weeks when the Huckleberries are ripe. Hopefully the mosquitoes will have died off by then and I will don lots of bug spray ahead of time, no matter how much I hate to.
 

Not all the bugs were bad. Here is a butterfly. I could have got a better shot if I had a lot of time, there were so many of them!
 

Here is a dragonfly. It's not quite in focus. I could have gotten a better shot of this if I took more time, but my husband kept asking me to look at the kids (they were being cute as usual).
 

Rachel Loves Marionberries

Notice Anything???

OK. I know this picture is corny. My four year old just loves picking Marionberries. So, I photoshopped the picture on her behalf.

The Fair

Summer Activities

We went to the fair yesterday. Summers are filled with so many activities that it is easy to feel overly busy. The kids love it though. I enjoyed the fair too. And, I know that during the rainy season when I am feeling homebound by all of the rain - I can look back to all of those activities and remember I'm not always homebound. I think it is about finding a balance. Not committing to everything, but doing what's really important to our family. This next week we are going camping. I tend to get stressed out at the thought of planning it, but all of these summer things are such important memories and I really do enjoy them once I get there.

Pictures From The Fair


Here are the three older girls at the fair.


Now, this was definitely the funniest thing I saw at the fair. You know how dogs do agility. And dog owners get really into it. These are Llamas. As you can see the Llamas are all dolled up like show dogs, and their owners are trying to take them through the course. I wish I could have taken more pictures. Here was one of the easier obstacles. The Llama just had to duck it's head and follow its owner under the PVC pipe.


But, you can see the Llamas weren't always so cooperative. Actually, they weren't usually very cooperative. Here they are trying to get this Llama to go over the tarp that is being blown by a wind machine. The Llama wants nothing to do with it. She wanted nothing to do with going over fence rails, on a teeter totter (which was only about three inches off the ground), on stairs, through cones, or having to back up either. It was entertaining.


This is a classic look for Mariah. When I come out with a camera Mariah usually smiles and poses, so I was glad to get a natural shot of her here. She is looking at a reptile in the Terrarium.


 Natalie looking at reptiles.

 

And here is a reptile.


Girls flying "high" in an airplane at the fair.

My Abigail

Baby Abigail


My baby, Abigail, is nine months old now, as of the 30th of July. She doesn't feel like a little baby now.

Well, she is talking for one thing. She says, "night, night Dada," although not always to her Daddy, and definitely not with the awareness that she is saying, "night, night." She, like the majority of children, does not like to go to sleep at the end of the day. She says, "I-UH", which is short for her sister Mariah's name. She says, "that" and points at things, though her "that" is really kind of a "dat". She says "sister" which is really more of a "disder" sound - for all of her sisters. And she says "ki ca" for kitty cat. She also says, "nuh nuh nuh nuh" when she doesn't like something. I don't even think you'd have to teach kids the "no" word, I think that "n" sound is just in there waiting to come out.

For another thing she is crawling and cruising and crumb crunching. She does a really speed crawl with one leg kind of up like a bear crawl. I think she got into that habit from trying to avoid crawling inside of (and making no progress) some of the dresses she wears. She stands up against the couch, the wall, and even the steam cleaner. She cries really hard when she knocks over the steam cleaner - even though she isn't hurt. And, she is a crumb cruncher (and sorry to say dirt eater). I've never had a baby that was so intent on putting EVERY LITTLE THING into her mouth. From a piece of macaroni that falls from the table, to a string, to one of those foam ear plugs, to little pieces of paper, to bark, to big chunks of dirt - I am constantly fishing things out of her mouth. But, when it comes time to eat her green beans, does she want them? No. She wants Bananas. Or that Pasta with Tomato and Meat Sauce that we are eating.

I love her. I love every little challenging thing about her. And I love that she loves me. And fusses to get to me. I love how smiley she is. I love how much of a go getter she is. I love to see her and her sisters being a gang, all playing together.

I Figured It Out

I just figured it out

I just figured out why I never had a baby that put sooooo... many things in her mouth before.

My first baby, Natalie, took a binky. In fact, she loved it so much, she frequently tried to put two binkies (pacifiers) in her mouth at the same time. We took it away from her at about 14 months. It wasn't hard. We just put them away.

My second baby, Rachel, sucked her second and third fingers. She sucked her fingers until she was about three and a half years old. Before that point we tried everything to try to get her to not suck her fingers - a sock and duct tape on her shirt, scolding, bitter apple on her hand - all to no avail. We got her to stop finally with the help of an appliance you put over their fingers for about three weeks. It's called a Thumb-Guard.

This baby doesn't suck anything - so her hands are free for exploring all the time.
 

Trip To Seattle

Last Weekend

Last weekend we took a trip to Seattle. We didn't tell the girls where we were going. I think they thought we were going camping for a while, since we go camping every year and hadn't been yet. But, we didn't bring a tent. They kept asking us where we were going and we kept telling them things like, "isn't this the way to Mt. Rainier?" When we got to our hotel, they asked where we were and we told them Tukwila, which was true. Of course, Tukwila is just minutes from Seattle.

 
 

Mariah & Abigail

At this point the girls were thinking we took them on this trip to visit the Family Fun Center which was outside the hotel window.

The girls are outside of the Burke Natural History Museum which is a neat museum with lots of artifacts and fossils. Unfortunately, they do not allow you to take pictures in their museum.
 

This is a sheep at the zoo. I don't know why they sheered her this way. I suppose they wanted to show the kids how thick their fur was long, yet they wanted to keep the sheep cool. This was the family farm section of the zoo. It was kind of funny because our kids are around more farm animals than they had there on a daily basis. My husband kept urging us on past that area, since it was nothing our kids haven't seen.
 
 

Girls watching the Flamingos.

The Flamingos were the highlight of the zoo for our girls.

We got to see the Giraffes up close.
 
 

Abigail crashed at the zoo.

Mariah crashed at the hotel the next morning.

 
 

The three older girls on the ferry.

Mariah outside on boat.

 

Rachel outside on ferryboat.
 
 

Coming back into Seattle on the ferry boat.

Mariah looking at a tide pool exhibit at the aquarium.