Can We Keep This Weather?!

This weekend weather has been more beautiful than we could have asked for!  After such a miserably hot summer, it is so nice to be able to turn the AC off and open some windows and enjoy lots of time outside and not be sweating our butts off!  And we did enjoy plenty of outside time this weekend!  Saturday morning was pretty uneventful with a trip to the grocery store, bank and library.  But we went to a wedding Saturday afternoon to see John's cousin get married (congrats Ashley!!), then headed off in the opposite direction to attend John's company picnic.  The kids weren't all that impressed with a wedding (no surprise), but loved all the bubble blowing afterwards!  They then had a GREAT time at the company picnic.  A couple of Ava's preschool friends were also there, so they had lots of fun playing together.  There was a big sandbox (complete with lots of toys and tractors), a bounce house, a big inflatable slide, a tractor pinata (with LOTS of candy) , snowcones, a vegetable car race, tug of war and all kinds of other fun!  We had a couple of very dirty kids by the time we headed home - not to mention a tired Mom and Dad from following Blaine up the big slide and sliding down MANY, MANY times!

Sunday, after church, lunch and naps, we enjoyed lots of play time outside!  Enjoy some of these pictures from our afternoon:)

 Both kids loved climbing trees - Blaine kept pointing up at more trees, saying "tree"

 And Ava is becoming quite the climbing monkey - a little too fearless at times, making me a bit nervous as she climbs rather high!  However, this pine tree makes for a perfect climbing tree!!

So cute - Blaine loving on Daddy

 Then we enjoyed a walk and bike ride after supper.  We walked down to see the neighboring cows - Blaine loves pointing out cows as we drive down the road and kept saying "tow" as we headed off on our walk, so we had to comply and head that direction:)  Ava loves riding her bike when we take walks - now to just work on the balance issue so we can take the training wheels off someday.  I think that may be a while yet though.  As the kids and I were off on a walk the other day, she started to scratch her nose and lost her concentration.  She then proceeded to veer off the road, down the steep ditch, then lay her bike over just before she reached the bean field.  She was a bit scared, but only had a small scrape on her leg.  Since we were just down the road from the neighbor's house, we stopped and Rick adjusted her training wheels back down a bit so she wasn't as wobbly.

And we continue to enjoy this age period with Blaine - it is amazing how fast they are learning new things at this age!!  He is saying new words every day and has a rapidly growing vocabulary.  We have learned that most of his "c" or "k" words come out with a "t" sound, so he has "tows" that say moo, drinks from a "tup", watches "tars" go down the road and loves to hug "titties"!  Got to watch that last one:)  But I know that one of these days, he will be saying everything perfectly and we won't have these cute little mispronunciations to be amused by anymore.