The Park!

As you may recall, Avery got a 12" Princess bike for her birthday a couple months ago. Lately she has been riding it a lot. But mostly around in the driveway behind our house. So last week I decided to take her to Oakwood Park where there's a nice bike path around a large pond.

She did great, although going down any kind of slope was hard for her since she was still learning how to brake. Since then she's become a pro at braking, which gives her more courage to go much faster. I pushed Camryn (and her baby doll Charly) in the stroller.
We finished up at the dock and fed the ducks some leftover hot dog buns. The girls love doing this and this pond has tons of ducks so it's really fun.

Then we went over to the playground to have a picnic lunch. There was a really annoying bee, however, that wouldn't leave us alone once we pulled out the strawberry applesauce so we were out of there before I could snap a pic or two.

Summertime Fun

I haven't blogged in a while, I know! So I thought I'd give an update on what we've been up to in the last little while...

The Wisconsin State Fair is a huge deal around here so we finally decided to check it out. I went by myself with the girls so we didn't get as much deep-fried yumminess on a stick as I would have if Merrick had come (although we did get a corn dog, seen below) but we did have a great time seeing all the sights. The kids loved all the animals, even though our favorite baby doll (Baby Samuel, named after their newest cousin) disappeared in the horse stables. "It's okay, Mom," Avery said. "We can get another one at Walmart." Oh dear.

In other news, we finally got a minivan. I know, we're that kind of family now. Just need 3 more kids and a trampoline now right? It's a Toyota Sienna and we l.o.v.e. it. The kids love the DVD player. Merrick loves the power sliding door. And I love finally having my own car again.

Two thumbs up from Avery!

Last week was SO humid and hot that we absolutely could not stand being outside for more than 10 minutes. So we decided to take a trip downtown to the Betty Brinn Children's Museum for the day. The girls had so much fun. My camera died about 3 pictures in so here's all I got, a shot of Avery doing her favorite thing - crafting and coloring:

And besides that, we did a 2 week session of swimming lessons for Avery at Wirth Park in Brookfield, which was fun but she definitely needs a lot more practice. We also celebrated our 6th Anniversary last Saturday. We went out without the kids to dinner on Friday night and on Saturday we drove down to Chicago with the kids where Merrick went to a sealing of some of our friends and then we went out to lunch at Red Robin and had our first ever experience at IKEA. Man, was that place awesome and overwhelming at the same time. We'll definitely be more prepared next time, though. Merrick also finished up his summer softball league, their team finishing first. And we got a new full-size bed for Avery. The bedding is coming in the mail tomorrow so I'll try to post some pictures of her room when we're done decorating.

It's been a fun summer. Things to look forward to: Avery starting 4K the first week of September (mornings, every day), Merrick's first ever business trip to market in NYC mid-September, and both of our moms are coming for visits in Sept/Oct. Lots of fun still in store before winter hits. :)

Flash Flood

I thought we had a lot of water last week!
Whew, it was raining most of the morning yesterday but then at about 4 or 5 it started pouring. So much rain so fast. By the time Merrick got home at 6:15 the backyard was a lake. This is how it looked this morning, about a foot deeper than last week and a much larger area.

In the back corner of this picture below you can kind of see that the creek that runs by our house is so full that it's overflowing into our backyard, where it's normally at least a few feet lower than that.

What a crazy storm. Freeways were closed down, Merrick said the roads were covered and on each side of the road were rivers flowing. Our unfinished basement had some water down there but nothing got damaged. It was mostly just leaking down and soaking some of the rugs that were on the floor. I can imagine some people got it much worse.

So... anyone want to go canoeing or rafting in our backyard today? :)

Strawberry Festival

In June we went to the Cedarburg Strawberry Festival. It was a hot and humid day but we had a great time with the kids. Our favorite area of course was the kid zone. We got their faces painted and colored on the mural...

Merrick made wands for the girls...

They got to try on some beautiful dancing costumes... (believe it or not, this is the best picture we got - silly Avery).

The kids got to play on this bouncy house slide for 5 minutes... (Can you believe it cost $6 for two kids to play for 5 minutes? What a waste. Oh and the guy who was timing our turn shortchanged us and said our turn was up after 3 1/2 minutes. Oh well.)

We bought some food to feed the goats at the petting zoo. Camryn was giggling as the goats licked her fingers!

And we also built a periscope with a free Home Depot kids workshop kit. After that we were hot and tired so we took a 10 minute hay ride to rest our feet.

And that's all the pics I have but we also ate strawberry shortcake, bought fresh strawberries, kettle corn, and a lot of other junk food. Avery got to see Hello Kitty and got a balloon. It was very family friendly and we love going to this festival every year (despite the crowds and the heat).

No Swings Today...

Last night there was a big storm that came through. There was a Tornado watch, flash flood warnings, etc. It looks like we got about 4-5 inches of rain in that one night! Check out what it did to our (and our neighbor's) backyard:
I guess we won't be playing on the neighbor's swingset today. The girls, of course, were excited to see the new lake in the backyard.This is why we have such a huge backyard - it's a floodplain. I guess one time a few years ago (before we moved here), the flooding was so bad that the water got halfway up that yellow slide! Crazy.

All this standing water can not be good for our mosquito problem. Great.