Playground date

On Wednesday morning we met our friends and neighbors at one of my favorite playgrounds for some fun. When we got there, Kandace was already well addicted to this spinny thing.

And Lizzie was wearing her new hat!

There is a bridge at the park and the kids love to play troll bridge. Can you spot the nasty troll waiting to catch the kids?

There's also a jeep. So much fun to cruise around in ;)


Lizzie jumped on the hood
And Braylon watched the fun from the swings.



All four kids lending a hand on a construction project!


Then Braylon decided he wanted to play too!






Braylon was a sliding machine! His favorite part though, was jumping on the bouncy bridge!

Spring Break Bonfire

On Tuesday we had arranged to meet Daisy and Tyler at the river for a bonfire. While we waited for time to leave, we went kayaking in the driveway.

Note to self: The river is always five hundred degrees cooler than the rest of the world. Remember that and dress accordingly. Also, it's always windy so bring three times as much wood as you think you're going to need. Wind + freezing cold + big bonfire pit = going through the wood way fast!

For once we made the kids cook their own lunch.


They were a bit confused since Daddy usually does that bit.

Daisy brought the stuff to make smores! Oh yum.

Dinner at the beach

Monday was a busy, busy day what with the birthday party and such. But come dinner time, we all felt like we needed to get OUTSIDE and clear the cobwebs. So we stopped at Subway and took our dinner to the beach.

It was cold.
But beautiful.

Playground break

Sunday after church we met up with our neighbors again to do a little birthday present shopping and then we went to the playground.

Oh look, it's my favorite spinny thing!

Since I can't seem to ride the spinny thing without falling off (rather spectacularly too, considering all the witnesses), I opted to ride on this thing for a while.

Oh yeah!

My kids have typically hated these bucket things. On the other hand, the neighbor boys could not get enough of them!




Soccer break!



David and his little friend, Isabel.

Then Lizzie decided to try out the buckets too.





Good times :)

More from the ranch...

If you're my facebook friend, then odds are you've already seen a series of pictures from our adventure out on the ranch this weekend. I had planned on posting essentially the same pictures to here...but then I realised there were so many good pictures I could practically do a different post about our adventure. So if you think you've already seen these, it might be worth a second look :)

Ever since I first met Denis he's been talking about his parents' property. They raised birds here and though there aren't very many birds any more, it is still an amazing place to have fires and let the kids run free. After months of hearing about it, we finally got to see for ourselves just what Denis was talking about.

The first thing we did was go see the sheep. I love sheep, thanks to grosspapa.


There they are, way off in the distance. I always wanted to be a sheep farmer like my grosspapa.

Then we came back to relax in front of the fire.

The view from my chair. AHHHH....

It was well after lunchtime when we arrived so we got busy eating pretty quick!

Our chef extrodinaire (and Denis' mom on the far left).

Lizzie likes to wander while she eats.

The eating (mostly) over and done with, the boys headed out to play in the field. Where there were two amazing tree stumps that doubled as space ships.

Griffy and Liz stayed closer to the old folks and played on the swing set.


Plotting their world takeover.

I let Griffin have the camera for a while. This is his shot of all their feet, while standing on the stump.
And then I had to high tail it out of town before my rotten child shot me!

I went for a stroll and found this goat.

And took a "family" photo :)

And then it was time for rides on the toys! SO jealous that only the kids got to test drive them. Can you spot griffy peeking out from behind his dad? And check out the HUGE smile on Elisabeth's face!


There they go!
After their ride, it was time to enjoy some marshmallows. YUM!

Another view from my chair.

David's turn for a spin around the farm.

And then David got to drive the quad. See how Kandace is screaming in fear?

And then Doug decided to smoke us all out. I guess we were cramping his style ;)

That's a whole lot of stinky brush fires he had going there...
Lizzie wasn't sure if she should stop, drop and roll, or run for the hills!!

And there they are, trying to figure out how to move this stump so they could burn it too...

I'm really surprised they didn't break out a chain saw and hack it to bits, but maybe the chainsaw was unavailable that day...