Summer

We enjoyed an awesome June...weather wise anyway. But alas, summer is most definitely here now. But it was off to a nice start for the girls when our good friends the Jorgensons invited a bunch of us over for a little swim party.
And as it so happened, it was perfect timing. We had planned to go to San Diego the next day to visit family and to celebrate some belated birthdays and father's day for their grandpa. We had asked their uncle Mark to give them (well, mostly Emily) a swim lesson. So it was really great to get the girls comfortable in the pool again. Emily didn't really skip a beat and jumped right in...quite literally. She is very comfortable around the pool...as long as she has her arm floaties on. Which is the problem, she has reached her limit in learning how to swim and so the floaties need to come off so that she can learn to swim without them.
She still has a long way to go but she made great strides. So hopefully we will be able to get another lesson in this summer. Thanks again Mark!

Father's Day

Christian got what he wanted for father's day this year. Which is mainly, time to spend at home and work on things around the house most of the weekend. He got a lot done. We were able to move enough of our stuff around so that we could use half of our garage now for actually parking one of our vehicles! The girls are so lucky to have such a hard working father that loves to do things for them. I know I'm lucky to have such a hard working husband. Hope you had a nice father's day Christian.

Pictures and details of the tree house we are building coming soon!

Kindergarten is over...

..for real this time. Yesterday was Emily's last day of kindergarten. I went to pick her up a few minutes early so that I could sneak in and take a few pictures of her.They just had another party (I think that they have had at least 3 this week). They were just winding down with some stories and songs. After I picked her up, we went to have a little picnic in the park. We went to the new Andulka Park. Caitlyn has been there several times but it was all new for Emily. So she had fun discovering all the new things to do there and Caitlyn had fun showing her big sister all the fun things to do. It was a bit crowded but we stayed there for something like 2 hours so that they could get lots of energy up.Christian promised them that if they both took a good nap, they could stay up for a movie marathon. Caitlyn retired to her bed halfway through the third movie. I had to call it a night shortly after as well. Emily, of course, stayed up for all three movies!

p.s. Apparently, I was wrong. After I went to bed, Caitlyn got back out of bed (or maybe DAD got Caitlyn back out of bed) to snuggle with dad on the sofa and they all stayed up past 2:am watching movies. Totally insane.

Garden projects

One of the garden projects we have been working on is not in our own garden but for our friend Marian. We started it a number of years ago as a birthday present for her. She had a juniper hedge around the front of her house and it was nice and easy to maintain but it didn't give much character to her house and she wanted a change so we decided to help her redo it with some California natives and other plants that would give a little more color and texture but did not require very much water. This is the front of her house before (well, actually, we started tearing it out before we thought to take a picture so imagine that the hedge went all the way across).
And this is what we replaced the left side of the house with (this is after it grew in a bit...the plants started off fairly small).But we didn't get any more of it done that this because it was sooo much more work than we anticipated. One of the reasons that her hedge was easy to maintain and there was almost no weeds to kill was that the previous owner filled the entire planter box with rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, tiny rocks...seemingly endless rocks. We dug out a good portion of it and replaced it with proper soil. So the right side of the house remained the same for the next several years because we afraid to open that can of worms again. Plus we were busy with the girls.

This year, for her birthday, we decided to continue working on the house and chose just the very front portion next to her entryway to work on. But we decided that there was no way we would be able to get it done the way we did it before so we just removed the rocks around the areas that we were planting and put some soil in those sections so that the plant would have something to thrive on. Here is Christian with the trunk of the juniper plus the roots that we got out.

It was still a lot of work because it is so difficult to dig around in the rocks. But this was still a ton easier than what we did last time. Hopefully it will work out okay like this.

The problem with our so called birthday presents to Marian is that she usually ends up working along side of us most of the time (or in the case of the last time we did this, she spent weeks digging up and hauling rocks to help us prepare the bed). So not only does she have to slave away doing manual labor but she usually ends up cooking up a feast for us as well.

So um...happy birthday Marian...I think...?!

Anyway, this past weekend, we went out for dim sum to officially celebrate her birthday with some of her other good friends and we put in one more plant. They are all pretty small right now so it looks a little sparse but they will fill in as the other side did. We are still missing a couple of plants. One of which was really plentiful at all the garden stores and home improvement stores just a month or so ago, but can't seem to be found anywhere now. Here is what it looks like right now.Happy Belated Birthday Marian...

Kindergarten is over...

...or it might as well be. Okay, they have one more week but they are just going through the motions. She only had a couple of pages of homework last week. They didn't even bother this week anymore.

Today she got her honor roll and citizenship awards at their little award ceremony.

On Monday, they have their "fun day" which is just a big all day carnival type deal.

Friday is their last day. It's supposed to be a half day I guess and everyone gets out at 12:30. My kid doesn't start class until 11:00 am because she has afternoon kindergarten. If I have to go back in just over an hour later to pick her up again...why take her in the first place?

I love June gloom!

These are the last couple of weeks before school lets out for the summer. It's June already and you just don't think that there will be any more beautiful days like this. We got a little rain and there was even some thunder. We had hoped for a bit more...at least enough to get into the ground but we'll take what we can get and be thankful for it!
We had a lazy late morning, enjoying the weather and taking pictures. After we dropped off Emily to school, we decided to take a short walk around the Botanic gardens before Christian went to work. I love it that he has a flexible schedule so that we can enjoy fine days like today.