1, 3........a lot

Lydia likes to be like her big sister. Sophie loves to count and Lydia is getting really good at it too. She can now count to 13 although she likes to skip 2 and 4. In Lydia's words: one, tee, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, evan, telve, errteen!

We have had a really good monsoon lately and the water runoff across the street has had a lot of water. The other day Chad took the girls to the park and they wanted to throw rocks in the water. And what did they find??

thousands of tadpoles!! Sophie was very protective over these little guys. Some boys in the neighborhood were collecting them and she followed them like a hawk and kept telling them not to hurt them or step on them. We asked the girls how many there were. Sophie started to count and then said "there's like one hundred" and Lydia started to count 1, 3...a lot!!! Here is the video...

Sadly the water dried out the next morning, luckily Sophie didn't notice or ask about them.

It's Alive!

Somehow our garden has magically come back to life! Our cantaloupe plant has gone nuts again! And shockingly our tiny little bean plants I thought for sure were doomed are green again and starting to flower.

That fateful night of the storm we ended up picking our honeydew thinking it wouldn't possibly survive...

But it definitely was not ripe and tasted like a cucumber... After tasting this we decided to leave the cantaloupe on the plant in hopes that maybe it would ripen. And it did!

Although it tasted like dirt...I think I picked it too soon. But we had 3 of these so I let the others ripen even longer and voila we had a cantaloupe that tasted like cantaloupe!!! It was very juicy but sadly it wasn't sweet. You have to not water it the last week while it ripens to get the sweetness, but we had so much rain that it didn't happen. But hey I think this was a successful gardening attempt! And who knows maybe its not too late for our plants to produce more?

Happy Birthday Lion Cubs

Saturday we headed to the zoo. They were celebrating the first birthday of the 3 lion cubs there. Sophie was so excited to sing happy birthday to them....

They had lots of activities and face painting. They even had a guy dressed up as a lion walking around. Sophie and Lydia especially loved the bubble machine they had set up for the lion cubs. Although the lion cubs didn't really care.

It was a nice overcast morning so I thought it was going to be nice a cool. Wrong the humidity was horrible and we were all pouring with sweat so I let the kids run wild in the Kenya Get Wet area...

They were soaked and happy.

Olympics Opening Ceremony Party

On Friday we were invited to a Opening Ceremony party for the Olympics from our friends in the ward! It was a lot of fun! They had yummy food from around the world like crepes, hummus, tres leches cake, cowboy chow, and I brought an English trifle. They had prepared some fun Olympics games for us all to compete in. First was ribbon dancing. The kids went first...

We had to unroll the roll of streamers as fast as we could. Then we had a basketball shooting contest.

Stephanie creamed all of the adults in that one! Then we competed against our spouses in shooting a soccer ball into the goal which Chad won (although technically he cheated :) )

We were all given medals! The kids were very excited!

It was such a fun night spending time with the Schuetzlers and the Gryglas and the girls loved playing with Hyrum and Maddy!

My Lil Swimmers

Sophie and Lydia graduated from swimming classes on Friday! They really enjoyed them and I will definatley be putting them in again next year....

Sophie loves going under water now and is comfortable jumping in! Before she wouldn't even get her head wet.

Lydia loves jumping too all by herself!

Now when we go swimming they jump in over and over again. They love it! They can go all over the pool with their life jackets. Lydia gets all excited and says "ice scoops!" (ice cream scoops) when she swims back to the lagoon to climb out and jump in again.

I am so proud of them!

Writing ABC's

Sophie has really gotten into spelling her name and writing her letters lately. Her favorite thing to do is to pull out our Scrabble Slam card game and find the letters to her name and lay it out. We have been practicing writing her letters too. I show her a picture of the letter and she copies it. Here is the first word she has written besides her name...

Can you tell what it says? (She had to continue it on the second line since she ran out of room)

Ice Keem!

Saturday was our Ward's Fire and Ice. We made ice cream for it and I learned an important lesson. Never use a recipe you have never done before when you have to take it somewhere for many people to try. I made this mistake and the ice cream tasted like frozen milk not cookie dough. Boo.

The girls had a lot of fun playing with all of the kids in the ward. The overflow was a like a war zone with balls flying everywhere, but they were all happy. When we were taking the ice cream out to the tables to serve, Lydia was chasing me and screaming "ice keem ice keem!!!!"

She definatley enjoyed tasting all the flavors....

She even put her face in it, but I am not sure if it was because the ice cream was so good or because it was extremely hot in the cultural hall with no air conditioning.....probably both.