Yes, I know we are a little crazy but we do celebrate our dogs birthday. Today Apollo turned 8 years old and for the past four years on his birthday we have taken him to the dog park and then to Mud Bay pet store to pick out some treats from the bulk baskets. Today was even more eventful than normal because when we got to the dog park we were suprised to find they were having a reenactment of the civil war to celebrate the 160th anniversary of Fort Steilacoom. It was a little strange to see all these people dressed up and hear all the cannons going off so I had to take a few pictures to capture the event, some people really get into this. They had all sorts of tents with food so we stayed for lunch and watched the festivities, it made for interesting Saturday!
Bathing beauty
Tired girl after a long day at the pool.
Shopping at El Paseo
I saw this headband in the store and had to put it on and take a picture, it was just too cute and Ella was too hot and tired to care.
Checking out the palm trees
Joshua Tree National Park
We took our first family vacation and headed down to Palm Springs on Mother's Day. We had a great time and were so happy to see some sun. We were expecting weather in the low 90's but ended up getting close to 100 or over one of the days, pretty hot but we weren't complaining. Ella was a perfect traveler, she did great on the plane and was content at the pool just hanging out with Bernie and I, although she was happiest in the water (big suprise)! We spent one day at Joshua Tree, which was beautiful and spent another day at the fabulous outlet mall they have down there! The rest of the time we just lounged by the pool, we will definitely be going there again. We all had a great time and were very sad to come home, we are already trying to plan the next family vacation.
While I was folding clothes this morning Ella thought it would be fun to sit in the laundry basket and then crawl out. She is getting pretty good at pulling herself up and has mastered the army crawl (which has made my life a lot busier) but it seems her favorite thing to do is push things across the floor. It's funny, you can spend so much money on toys for your kids and they will find joy in the simplest of things. I only wish I was as big of a fan of laundry as Ella is!
I took Ella to my friend Jen's house for a play date on Friday! There is a group of us longshore wives who all have kids around the same age so we try to get them together to play as much as we can all fit it into our crazy schedules. There were a total of nine kids at Jen's and they all got along and played really well together. Michael and Ella are the youngest and are just a month apart, they are so cute together. It is so fun watching everyone's kids grow up, we are looking forward to many more play dates in the future!
Ella had her first boating experience Monday and had a blast. She is a natural boater, when she was helping daddy get the boat ready in the driveway she was waving to all the neighbors driving by. Once we got the boat in the water and got moving she would giggle and scream. I thought that she might get a little nervous but she was great, it was me that was the nervous one. Although my nerves were calmed once I saw how much fun she had. Everything went well and she seemed to really enjoy herself the only problem we had was that she is not such a big fan of her life jacket. I am hoping she will get used to it since we plan on spending a lot of time on the water this summer!
Last weekend with the nice weather we decided it was a great day for a hike. Since neither of us had ever been to Snoqualmie Falls we decided to drive up there and check it out. Bernie is always telling me that I need more hobbies and I tell him that hiking is one of my hobbies. He laughs because in the almost seven years that we have know eachother we have only been hiking three times. We really enjoyed ourselves and it was a good family day so hopefully we will start going more often.
