Lydia was excited to try on a new pair of earrings after she could take the pair out that she was pierced with. These earrings are scarlet colored (garnet), and since her middle name is Scarlett, they are a hit with her.
One Sunday before church, we tried to get an updated picture of the kids with Snoopy. These are some of the winners.
Tanja has had this hammock for years from a trip she took when she was younger to Ecuador or Peru. The hammock has never been used a single time in the 15 or so years she has had it. After seeing neighbors with hammocks in their yard during our walks, we finally got around to getting some hooks to hang this hammock from our deck support beams. Tanja was pleased with the results; I'm not sure if Snoopy felt the same. The kids like it too.
One day, the kids were on the trampoline in the backyard. Suddenly, I heard a lot of laughing and noticed Karina sitting on the edge of it. I walked down to investigate and saw that somehow her hair had become stuck in the zipper of the netting around the trampoline. Being the Father of the Year candidate that I am, my initial inclination was not to help my daughter by methodically working her hair out of the zipper, but to run inside to get the camera. Because of my twisted sense of humor, of course I followed through with my initial inclination. She was a good sport and smiled for the picture before I extricated her.
We spent most of August in Florida, both in Miami and in Disney World in Orlando. Tanja, the kids, and I went to Disney World for a week in the middle of the trip (while Snoopy stayed with Mimi and Mormor). Tanja, the kids, and Snoopy spent a week at Mimi and Mormor's house in Miami both before the Disney trip and after. I had the house to myself for four days before I flew to Miami and then three days afterwards. It was pretty lonely, but I did catch up on sleep and packed more hours in at work to conserve vacation time. The rest of this post will be pictures from Miami before we went to Disney World.
One day, Tanja, the kids, and Mimi went to The Frost Museum of Science. (Mormor flew in from Norway the next day). Lydia got to lift herself up using a pulley system.
They found a spoonbill in a special enclosure. A few seconds after this picture was taken, Karina had scooted over to the right side of the bird. It then began walking toward her making biting motions and was definitely going to attack, but she squirmed away less than a foot from the angry bird.
The girls built a perfect arch bridge with loose foam blocks.
I think one of the biggest highlights of Mimi and Mormor's house was their swimming pool. We were in there twice a day and the kids had a blast playing and swimming and the girls going underwater. Here's Lydia with her Mr. Ray net from Finding Nemo as she hunts around for objects to capture.
Lydia swam with her PuddleJumper floaties on most of that week. Last summer she swam without floaties, but this summer she didn't feel secure enough.
Karina and Mormor had fun together.
Little lizards are all over Miami, and the screen enclosure around the pool was no exception. However, this lizard has 2 tails! We had never seen such a weird lizard, so Tanja took a picture of it. Lizards can lose their tails in an emergency and the tails will regrow. This set of tails both look like regrowths, but for some reason there are two.
Derek loved having extra attention from Mimi and Mormor.
Derek was a good helper for Mimi in the yard. He frequently helped Mimi clear out some weed branches. Derek also thought it was his job to help Mimi look for Snoopy poop in the back yard, so that they could shovel it to a corner. Now that we are back in Maryland, he wants to look for dog poop on walks so that he can shovel it (luckily people tend to clean up after their dogs here).
Before I came, they made a trip to Bill Baggs State Park to go to a calm, family friendly beach. The water was incredibly warm and the sand nice. Karina and Lydia preferred the water, and Derek liked the sand.
Back at Mimi and Mormor's it was time for more swimming in the pool.
By the end of the week, Lydia decided she would try swimming without floaties. Of course she could do it, and quickly her confidence in her swimming abilities was high. She also learned to swim comfortably underwater, instead of doggy paddling everywhere. Lydia liked jumping in and I got to play with settings on the camera to take rapid fire shots, so I think these next two are from the same jump.
All that jumping makes a girl tired, so she rested in a peaceful backfloat for a bit.
Tanja liked to sit on a beach ball in the pool for long periods of time so that she could just remain seated in the water, relaxing. Karina started a silly game where she would sit on a beach ball and pretend she was sitting on an 'invisible bench'. In Girls Scouts last year she performed an Invisible Bench skit with the other girls, and she would do the skit and song in the pool in Miami sitting on a beach ball. Then the joke is that at the end of the song, someone comes up to them and tells them that the invisible bench was moved yesterday, at which point, she would fall down in the skit. In the pool version of her song, the ball is released from underneath her, and she falls into the water.
You can see the ball underneath her:
Here's Karina falling off her invisible bench. Lydia and Derek liked this game too.
The pool was a great way to have fun and stay cool on the hot Miami summer days.
As we prepared for our trip to Disney World, Mormor found these vintage Daisy Duck and Goofy hats from when Tanja and her brothers went to Disney World as kids. Derek and Lydia thought they looked fun to wear for pictures and we wound up taking them with us.
Here we are getting ready to pile into our rental car for the trip up to Orlando to go to Disney World.
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