Mass Ascension of the balloons in the morning. We thought we were doing pretty good arriving around 7am, but apparently people start filling the park around 5:45. Sorry, not with babies. All the kids are in this picture but not all looking. That's Eva's beautiful blond hair in the foreground, Ryan covering his face behind the stroller, and you can pretty much see everyone else.
Look closely at this balloon. There is no basket but the man is attached with a little seat. Kind of funny.
I didn't get as many pictures of Isaac as I would have liked. With trying to make it to three different games each Saturday, I didn't always get to stay for his games and when I did I didn't always have the camera. He was kind of the star player on his 4 man team this year. Mostly because he'd played before and was starting to catch on to defense and taking the ball away from the other team etc. The other boys it was their first year and one had just had a cast taken off, so he couldn't run very fast etc. Isaac would have been happy just to play even if he hadn't scored a lot etc. Last year and this he comes home excited and saying they won, whether they did or not. I'm just happy he gets to run around a lot and get out some of his energy!
Nicole played for the first time this year--the rest of her team has been playing for a while. She had a phenomenal coach, really encouraging and built the girls up as well as knowing his stuff. Nicole REALLY had fun despite not really knowing the other girls on the team. The thing that impressed me most about Nicole and Isaac is how much running stamina they had.
These were from a few months ago before she was walking. She LOVED wearing shoes on her hands. Curt called the laundry room her "jackpot" since the shoe shelves were in there and she'd pull them all down and pick a pair to wear on her hands. For a month or so there it was hard for the other kids to get their shoes on. If she were near by she would take them or fuss if they took them or tried to put them on because she wanted them for her hands.
Helping Curt clean up the grout
Unloading the dishwasher
Funny sleeping habits. This one is a little hard to tell because of the angle, but her arm/hand and leg are up a ways above the bumper.
We found her many nights with her arm around one of her animals.
Heidi gnaws on her apple . . .
The beautiful scenery, and Ryan
We took the kids to the fair. We spent most of the time looking at the animals, then let them pick two rides. Isaac and Nicole chose the Ferris wheel-no picture-- and the biggest, fastest kid roller coaster--such dare devils!!--ha ha.
Ryan chose the safer route. Purple dinosaurs and elephants, and a jeep.
This was our favorite animal. It was one of the stock horses. They are all huge but this guy was gargantuan!! His name should have been Goliath but it was Oscar. The man standing directly behind the horse (I thought that meant sure death, but maybe not if you are the owner) is Curt's height, if that helps give you an idea of how big it was. We watched a little bit of the stock horse pull (they harness two horses together and they pull thousands of pounds of weight) and Oscar was much bigger than his pulling partner. They looked a little bit unequally yoked, but there wasn't another horse there that was near his size!!
I missed this cute picture, but Heidi had her hand up to touch and the horse had put it's head down and let her pet it.
To add to our bug collection . . . this guy (or girl?) was a few houses down the street crossing the road, so we had to stop and observe. For the record, I also saw a tarantula in Palo Alto on Stanford campus once so beware my CA friends there are big spiders there too!
