Summer play

The early craziness of getting the house ready to show has passed so we've been trying to have a little summer fun before the craziness really hits in a week or two.

We let Molly into her face paints the other night. She made herself up as a cat.

Kate hit the 20 pound mark after only a week of stuffing her with butter and ice cream. Hooray!!

We went to a birthday party at the Drawbridge Puppet Theater last weekend, a place we'd been meaning to visit for years. Turns out it was a good thing we never went. Molly was terrified (and I don't blame her, it was dark and loud and puppets were jumping out from all over). There was a lovely garden just outside, though, so we spent the time walking around and waiting for cake.

Thursday I took the girls on our annual trip to Davis Farmland. It was hands down the best time we've ever had there. In previous years Molly was pretty creeped out by the animals, which climb all over you trying to get food pellets. This year she was really into brushing the goats and cows, squeezing the pretend cow utters and even listening to the tour guide on the hay ride. Cool!

And Kate? She's going through a very intense animal phase. She pants (the baby sign for dog) whenever she sees anything vaguely animal-like. She points out birds, the bunnies in our front yard, anything. She can even say "cow" when she is talking about the rubber ride-on cow that Kim gave her. (Her only other words up until this week were "down," "mama" and "dada") So being in a place where there were animals everywhere, she was delighted and surprised by something new about every five minutes.

It was the first time I've felt the pull between two children with their own desires, usually Molly wanting to move on to something else and Kate wanting to stay longer. Fortunately Molly's old enough to get a little ahead, go into the reptile barn alone, etc. so it wasn't much of a problem. And Kate's young enough that she forgets what she wanted as soon as something else exciting is put in front of her.

And both agreed that the splash park rocks!

About half-way through the day Kate picked up a new word. Here she is getting excited on our return from the spash park area when she saw the pen of goats.

Speaking of goats, Molly ate quite a few bites of plastic wrapper at lunch before I realized what was happening (she wanted her fruit roll-up so badly that she didn't want to tell me that she couldn't get it peeled off the wrapper).

And Kate gave the goat babies so much love that at one point I had to pull goat hair out of her eyebrows and brush it off her cheeks. Twice she picked up animal droppings, once fresh out of the sheep.

It doesn't get much better than that.