4th of July

This year we had a pretty low key 4th of July.

We went to the All Abilities Park. Ella had a great time going down the slides, climbing and jumping with Daddy.

We went to the recycled reads store. I bought books. Ella and Daniel had a book reading party! (Ella made sure that everyone had a seat!)

On the 4th we made ice cream in our ice cream ball! Ella loved to help stir up the ingredients. She wasn't so sure about eating the ice cream though.

We also went for a walk, and played around the house.

Ella the Kitty Cat

Ella got a Cat towel for a baby shower gift. (Long before she was born.) We would use it on and off to dry her after her baths. Recently she has really gotten into being a kitty-cat when she puts the hood on. She will say "meow," and beg to not take of the towel. She even asked to wear it to bed.

Park Fun and Other Ella Cuteness

Ella has finally gotten big enough to use the park equipment independently. It is lots of fun that she can climb up and then go down the slide over and over on her own. She also loves to "drive" at the park.

Ella also likes to climb into the empty cabinets in the kitchen. She is getting smart though so she slides open the drawer above so it won't be too dark when she closes the cabinet door.

She likes to climb into her basket and hang out with all of her stuffed friends. She will ask until every stuffed animal is in the basket with her.

Ella also loves shoes. Sometimes she gets into Momma Shoes!

Splash Pad Adventures

This week we went on our first summer splash pad adventure.

We played in the big sand box.

Then we played at the splash pad!

Ella had a great time and would run back to me with a happy squeal after getting all wet.

Birthday

This year Daniel made me a delicious pie for my birthday. He knows my feelings about frosting, so he went to the effort to make a pie.

I decided to use my birthday money to buy a project (Before and After). It was supposed to be a microwave cabinet, but it ended up being too big. We finished it up and decided that it would make a great craft room storage unit.

The Puzzle DASH

No, it wasn't a mistake that I capitalized 'DASH', and I'm also not yelling the word as I write the title.  It's just the acronymn for the activity Elissa decided would be my birthday present.  A couple years ago we heard about the 'Different Area Same Hunt' and thought it sounded like fun, but we were going to be out of town when they did it, and the next year we had a happy addition to our family and suddenly found ourselves with a lot less time and energy for something like that.  Well, Elissa was really thoughtful this year and thought she would register a team for me to go with some friends while she selflessly stayed home devotedly missing her dear husband.  (I really hope she had a good time and did something interesting while I was away).

I find it really hard to describe the format of this thing, but I'll try to give a quick description.  It consisted of 9 puzzles (+ a pretty-much-mandatory-if-you-want-to-be-competitive bonus puzzle) over the course of ~8 hours.  Each puzzle starts with a prompt and some materials (a diagram, tiles with words on them, etc.) and you had to figure out what the puzzle actually was, how to solve it, and obviously solve it.  Usually there was a pretty obvious hint how to get started. For example in one case we had to figure out how to place game tiles, then assign each tile a letter, then look around until we found a message with a new hint, then we had to flip the whole thing upside down and unscramble some words before taking a single letter from each word, finally constructing the single word answer.

All in all we had a good time and finished with a probably respectable score putting us ahead of 1/4 of the contestants, which seems pretty good for it being our first time and choosing the "Expert" difficulty instead of "Novice".

Hopefully I'll be able to find equally nice to do for Elissa (maybe we'll send her next year or we can be a team or something).

Crazy Weather

We had some pretty crazy weather this last week.  We knew it was going to be wet -- and that's a very good thing given our drought conditions -- but we had no idea how much water to expect.  Right before all of this we thought it might be a good idea to try to plant some grass seed in our lawn because it's dying and sad.  Within a couple of days probably half of the seed had rushed away from where we planted it due to the heavy rain.  It continued day after day and came to a head on Memorial Day.  That day we ended up with a squall line that basically stayed stationary over our area and dropped around 5" inches of rain over the course of the day.  It also brought my first experience with a tornado warning (no tornados came close to our area but we got a warning).  Since nothing crazy happened during the warning, it was a good drill showing us several holes we had with our preparedness.  What we were surprised by is all the people who were driving around with all the weather warnings in the area as we watched some coverage.  I took a couple of videos of what the storm did do our front and back yards after the warning was over.