A windy day at the beach

We have new neighbors from Maryland.  Though she's originally from Alaska, we went to college with her brother.  Michelle, a nurse, is so sweet.  And my kids LOVE her!  Sadly, they're only renting the house...

Anyway, one extremely hot week here, she asked if the kids and I wanted to go to the beach for the day.  We jumped on the chance.  We'd had so many lovely beach experiences in recent years (and just a couple of weeks before), that I was not prepared for the super foggy, cold, incredibly windy weather.  I honestly didn't even want to get out of the car.   We made it two hours, though, and the kids had fun.  Poor Porter was under a towel most of the time and he still had sand collecting under his eyes and a thick layer on his scalp.  Thankfully no one got sand in their eyes (definitely a miracle).

The only place that was even remotely out of the wind had little chunks of charcoal everywhere, so we were instantly black all over, too.  Not my favorite trip to the beach, though we did get ice cream and have fun with Michelle.

Check out the chub!

The wind did that, not the kids!

Filthy face from the charcoal all over.

Sweet boy

Needless to say, this guy doesn't get nearly as many baths as the other two did at his age...  ;)

He's just about the sweetest thing ever.  Thanks again for the adorable towel, Joani!

Turquoise Day

I don't have many clothes that I'm loving right now.  One Sunday (in June), after I got dressed in the only clean thing I could stand to wear and had unthinkingly dressed Porter in a similar color, Judson and Cooper both picked out turquoise outfits.  I embraced it and made sure to get some pictures.  (We went to my parents' after church and Macy had on a turquoise shirt when we got there. :)

Anna put Macy's fleece on Rowland so he could join in the turquoise fun.  :)

Sending cars down the "hill" behind the quilting barn

These two have so much fun together!

She put her arms up like that all by herself.  Morgan must have taught her that.  ;)

Starting to fall over...

...at least it ended with laughter and not tears!

This guy is growing up too fast for my liking!

...and the next thing I knew, they'd taken off their clothes and were running away...

Forest Friends

This mama and her babies were almost a daily sight around here for awhile. They were a lot tinier than this when we first spotted them.

The last picture shows the early work Nate did to get the ground flat enough for our new play structure.  (Go ahead and think it.  "Only an engineer...")  ;)  He's made a lot of progress since then, but hasn't had much time, so no play structure yet.

Cousin Fun at Memorial Park

Rowland (17 months at the time)