This Week's Outing: California State Fair!

To keep our summer interesting and fun, and to take advantage of Dave's more relaxed schedule, we are trying to do one fun, bigger family outing per week.  We've done berry picking, amusement and water parks, ball games, camping, and, this week, the California State Fair!  We have great memories of previous visits to the State Fair, made in the past when the girls were very young and we had visiting family members.  We were excited to go back after such a long time.  

A favorite stop is always the baby animal area.  We just love those adorable baby lambs, kids, and piglets!

 We also got to watch chicks actually hatching!  These incubators were full of cracking eggs and newborn birdies soggy and stumbling around freshly hatched.  So cool!

 The fish and game section of the fair is always fun too.  Here Delia finally worked up enough nerve to put her arm into the tank of sturgeon.  And once she did, and felt how smooth and cool these fish were, she did not want to leave!

 At the Cal Fire station we talked with fighters about the sad and nearby Ferguson Fire.  The girls also got to sit in this (and another) brand new truck!

The agriculture area is a place to learn a lot.  There are huge gardens showing just about every kind of produce that our state grows, and plenty of pretty flowers too.  The girls learned about water conservation and each planted a flower/herb in a special water-wicking pot to take home. 

Now, let me take a moment here to say that I did great research on this outing.  I picked a day to go that had a nice "Kids Go Free!" deal.  I did NOT think to check out the weather forecast.  My phone said it was 102 degrees and that heat did slow us down quite a bit in the afternoon.  We found an amazing air conditioned pavilion that showcased wonderful farm fresh booths, handing out samples of all their goodies, like cheese, olive oil, nuts, ice cream and honey.  We must have walked through this area 17 times!  The honey sample people were starting to give us the stink eye.

One of these air conditioned pavilions also had our favorite Silent Disco.  Here you could grab a pair of headphones, set them to your preferred dance music (and coordinate your color with your peeps so you could all be hearing the same thing) and then dance away under the lights and disco ball!  Genius, right?!  And hilarious to see a bunch of people dancing to music only they could hear!

We ate fun fair foods, looked at all the arts and crafts submissions, watched a crazy motocross show, strolled through the barns of animals being judged, and took just one ride together on the monorail that drives you around and above the vast fair grounds.

It was hot day, but a good one!  I grew up going to county fairs with my grandpa, and, as I said, we had happy memories of visiting this State Fair with the girls years and years ago.  It was fun to go back and see, do, and learn more with them being older.

 The day ended with a soothing Footsie-Wootsie.  Still just a quarter! :)

PKs Go Wild on the Hot Dog

I've had some random blog post titles, but this one may just be my craziest!

We were so thankful that, as we soar into temps well over 100 every day, our good friends and ministry partners, Anne and Patrick, invited us to the lake for a day on Anne's family's boat.  There is nothing more summer to me than the feel of the wind whipping your hair and the lake water spraying your face as you zoom around on a speed boat.  If this weren't enough of a delight, we also got to be entertained by our crazy kids teaming up to go as nuts as possible on the hot dog tube.  There was flossing, there was dabbing, there was seat rearranging.  And there were the inevitable bumps that caused our kids to fly and get dumped into the water-- which everyone but Delia LOVED!  Anne and I took a turn too (no pictures of that, though).

We're so thankful for friends who share their resources for staying cool!  I'll post soon about just how many different people's pools we've been this summer.  We've been counting and it's a big number!  Any guesses?

Happy Birthday, Delia!

I'm a few weeks late, but I still wanted to throw a couple pictures on the blog chronicling the day Delia turned 11.  Again, with our family about to dive into VBS, the busiest week of the summer, we didn't plan anything too huge for July 13.  But, since Delia is my expressive child, you can see that the little things we did still brought her GREAT joy!

 Donuts for breakfast.

A pile of perfect presents.  Thank you friends and family members for getting Delia all her favorite things!  Above is the best picture of the day, taken when she opened one of my gifts-- a laser tag set.  Do you think they liked it? ;)  Summer of 2018 will be remembered for many things, epic nighttime family laser tag battles at church will be one of them.

 The number one thing on Delia's wish list this year was "purple hair dye".  I did indulge, but with a super temporary version that washes right out.  It's actually been a lot of fun.

 Ella agreed to make Delia's birthday cupcakes.  The order was for "crazy, pink and purple, rainbow, unicorn cupcakes" and I think Ella delivered!  

For Delia's birthday dinner we did something kind of different and fun.  She hemmed and hawed about what she wanted, unable to pick a favorite food or restaurant.  We discovered it was because she couldn't narrow it down to just one.  So, we did a progressive dinner!  We shared an appetizer at one restaurant (a bloomin' onion).  Had her favorite entree at another restaurant (shells and cheese). And finished with her favorite dessert at a 3rd restaurant (a pizookie).  This idea sounded great until we finished our shared appetizer and realized 3/4s of our family eats like birds and hardly had the appetite to continue!  

And so here we are-- parents of 11 and 13 year old daughters.  I could say much about the fears of double middle school angst and puberty being about to knock on our door.  But, I think that would ruin Delia's birthday post! :)

The Likes and Loves of an 11 Year Old Delia

Age: 11

Favorite color: Purple

Favorite food: Donuts and churros

Favorite book: It changes all the time, right now it's Isle of the Lost 

Favorite movies: Descendants 2 and The Greatest Showman

Favorite songs: Greatest Showman soundtrack and Hold On  

Favorite thing to play: :With my friends, or Littlest Petshops

Favorite part of school: My teacher and friends

What I want to be when I grow up: Zookeeper

The perfect day is: Swimming with friends, then eating my way through a candy shop

My best friends are: Kate, Elle, Lilly, Reagan, Addison, Cailyn, and Lacey

The best part of this year has been: Getting Ivy and going to Hawaii

The worst part of this year has been: Getting "The Talk"

I hope when I'm 11, I will: "Get a part in the Middle School play, keep my grades up and stay organized and responsible through 6th grade."

No W, But Still Fun

The best end-of-the-year gift that I got from a student this year was tickets to a Cubs game in San Francisco!  This game has been hanging out on our mid-July calendar for a while and was something we've been looking forward to all summer!  

 It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny day by the bay-- perfect for a ball game!

We always love getting to the park a little early so the kids can race down the Coke slides and play on the trolley. 

 While we were strolling around, we ran into 2 different families we knew from school (both Cubs fans too)!  The game's attendance was 41,000!  What are the odds?!

Our seats were really cool-- something totally new for us!  We were in a middle-balcony section, hanging as far off left field as the stadium goes.  Our section was only 3 rows deep and every seat around us will filled with fellow Cubs fans!  We has the best time chatting and cheering with them.  Towards the end of the game, another Cubs couple even moved over by us because we were having so much fun and they wanted to join the party!  Another fun part of these seats was having first Schwarber and then Zobrist playing deep left field RIGHT UNDER US!  We saw up close all the impressive almost-home-run grabs they made and feel sure they could probably hear us screaming encouragement at them! :)

Wowza!  This game was a nail-biter!  Almost all the runs scored were exciting home runs.  And then it stayed tied at 4-4 through 13 innings!  Each time we'd come to the top, we'd get excited that the Cubs would finally pull ahead.  And each time we'd come to the bottom, we'd get nervous that they'd let the Giants walk off.  What a 4 extra innings roller coaster!  We joked that we really got our money's worth!

    

Unfortunately, this picture, taken at the end of the game and showing our section's fun side view, does not have our W Flag in it.  After the long and intense battle, the Cubs could not secure the victory.  But, to see an exciting game in good company on a gorgeous day in a fun park was still the best day.  And Delia had 2 things of nachos, so it was still a Win for her. :)  What a great teacher gift!  We're so thankful! 

Aspen Meadow and Pinecrest

With the one big event for this summer being Hawaii, I knew we'd have plenty of days at home this season.  I love a restful summer and am certainly not complaining, but I also knew I needed a strategy to keep us from getting too stir crazy.  So, all the weeks of summer have at least one fun family outing marked on them.  Things we've done and have coming up include amusement and water parks, VBS, a baseball game, and an overnight in the city.  This past week the outing was a quick camping trip to our favorite mountain lake oasis, Pinecrest!  

We tried something new this year and kicked off our camping days with a trail ride through Aspen Meadow and the Immigrant Wilderness.  This was amazing!  The kids loved being on horses for a longer ride and the views were breathtaking.  You know we continue to try and convince our kids that hiking is awesome.  We are successful in this attempt only some of the time.  This experience gave us all the views and peace of plodding along through forests full of deer and fields full of wildflowers, but had the horses doing all the work.  A big WIN for Delia! :) 

After horseback riding, we made our way over to Pinecrest to set up camp.   This year we all enjoyed Dave's Father's Day present at our campsite-- a tree hammock.  Actually, we girls may have even monopolized it a bit!  Really, a good book you are sharing with your kids, cooler temps, a view of trees, the smell of the fire, and a slight breeze to keep you swaying, what more could one need?!  We were definitely happy campers!

After pitching the tent and making lunch, we took a short hike to our geocache spot to do the annual maintenance.  It's always fun to read the comments from those who have found it!

Ella perfected her marshmallow roasting skills.

And we spent plenty of time at the lake!  We took advantage of the twilight boat rental hours and shared a kayak for 2 hours.  We played some cards and built some sand castles.

We bobbed around on rafts and read in the sand.

And we took "Eat ice cream for lunch" off the Summer Bucket List!  Pinecrest is our happy place, indeed.

Fourth Festivities

I don't even know how many years we've been doing this, but the tradition of sharing Independence Day with Phil, Jetta and their kids lived on this summer!  Swimming, BBQ, kid-decorated berry flag cakes, goofy fun while waiting for night to fall, and a show of fireworks were the ways we once again celebrated the USA's birthday.  Special this year was the addition of some new friends!  We loved having Tim and Donna and their kids join the fun!

(I was told the flag cakes were "abstract" this year!)