First I had to share real quick… we don’t always encourage the kids to play with food, but once in awhile — we have fun with it. LOL. Here’s Bailey’s dinner plate tonight.. pancakes, bacon, eggs, potatoes, and apple slices… they ended up being like teddy bears but the heads were made with mickey mouse pancake shapers…. the eggs are supposed to make a sunshine LOL.

Still nothing too exciting to report on day two of Summer vacation. The kids are just enjoying unstructured playtime. I’ve given them free reign of video games, going to the park, heeleys outside, remote control cars, tv time, Webkinz, etc. Just a break from routine, from schedules, from time limits and restrictions. They ARE still doing all of their regular chores and keeping their rooms clean, and the corner has seen a couple of noses for arguing, so no — my kids are not fully running my roost I don’t plan on them sitting in front of the TV or the playstation all summer though, we’ll be getting back into a good summer schedule probably by the weekend.

McKenzie decided to make lunch for everyone today. We had Mac N Cheese w/hot dogs and Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches. I didn’t think she’d be able to prepare 5 sandwiches, but she did and a great job it was! It was so darn cute, I thought I’d better photo-document it.

It’s the first day of Summer Vacation and what are we doing? Not a darn thing really. We have several boxes/tubs to unpack still, so maybe we’ll work on that and some garden stuff in the backyard.

Oh and one cool thing I have to talk about today…. We’ve recently been introduced to the life of Cable TV since moving here. Along with that came… ON DEMAND. It’s the coolest thing and has helped settle my kids down several times the past couple of weeks (right now Tanner and Bailey are watching Prince of Egypt on it, it’s the quietest they’ve been in days LOL). Anyway, we were flipping through some different things last night and came across a preview of Bindi The Jungle Girl.

Is she not the most adorable little girl ever?

What a weekend! We stopped at Sportsmen’s Warehouse and started planning our upcoming camping trip, while we did a little shopping. We haven’t camped in years, we need pretty much all the equipment. David was stoked about the Mariner’s game, though he didn’t talk much about it when he finally got home… the M’s lost 1-16. Yikes, but he was really going to see Griffey, anyhow. Gramma Lisa, the kids (minus Katie who stayed the weekend at Great Grandma’s) and I had a yummy dinner at The Cheesecake Factory Friday night. I don’t think I’d return with the kids. The restaurant was really nice, the booths were nice and big. However, they did not offer a children’s menu, crayons, anything of that nature and we had a hard time keeping the kids on their bottoms in the booth until the food arrived about 30 minutes after we were seated. They had excellent bread though and the chicken/gravy/mashed potato dinner we ordered was EXCELLENT. I ordered a slice of some type of candy bar cheesecake to go. It was scrumptious! I’d love to go back… sans kids.

The kids got to swim on Friday night for about an hour at Gramma Lisa’s pool. They had a great time

Our Saturday agenda included a trip to the Point Defiance Zoo, followed by the horse races at Emerald Downs (we are not big gamblers, we just went for fun and to show our horse loving girls the horses). Again, another nice day… the zoo is a lot smaller and features less animals than our Oregon Zoo but we enjoyed the Baby Beluga show and the kids play area is fantastic.
The horse races were alot of fun. The girls all adore horses, they ran to the fence every time one walked by or the races were going. We let them play along by picking horses for us to bet on for them. Tanner had luck on his side that day, he picked winner after winner after winner. He was having a good time with that. Bailey would pick a horse and yell “that’s my horse” and get so excited when her horse won, which actually happened a few times! Us… not so lucky. LOL. But it was a good time.

Sunday we drove up to a campsite called Beaver up on the Wind River on a whim. It had been raining all day, so we just jumped in the car, thinking we wouldn’t really be getting out and walking around, but it cleared up for awhile and we did. We weren’t quite prepared. It was a beautiful spot to take pictures We met The Houstons along the way, and they went to check it out with us. Beautiful area, but we won’t be camping there anytime soon - it wasn’t really what we were looking for We decided to go with a campground called Seaquest, our first time camping there… so that should be fun. It’s right by Mt St Helens and has lots of hiking trails. Let’s hope the volcano stays sleeping during our stay

~Jessica

1/31/08 - I can’t get these pictures to upload properly, so please check them out at our old journal archive page: June 2007 or our photo gallery: June 2007. Thanks!