fruits of summer

Sam is our little fruit eater.  His very first favorite food was mandarin oranges.  Next, he went through a banana phase.  Like his sister, he loves a good strawberry.

Last summer, we introduced Sam to watermelon.  He loved it, of course.  As soon as he had cleared his plate, he begged for more.  One day he just kept repeating that cycle of eating his plateful and begging for more.  He ate and ate and ate until his little tummy couldn't take it any more and he spewed pink vomit all over my kitchen.

Fortunately, last year's experience didn't ruin his appetite for watermelon.  On Saturday, I cut a huge melon for Kate's birthday party.  When I had more than enough for our guests, I was left with a beautiful wedge of cool pink fruit.  I saved it for Sam.

Sam had watermelon with his lunch yesterday and he loved every bite of it.  He ate it literally down to the rind and even took a bite of that too.  When I finally took away the remainder of it, he cried in anger at me. I guess I know what we'll be making room for in our fridge this summer.

summertime fun

Temperatures pushing 100 degrees?

No big deal for two native Texans and one almost native Texan.

Happy summer y'all!

staycation

 So I dropped off the face of the blogosphere for a week long "staycation" and it was glorious.

(Dave hates the word "glorious" but sometimes it is just truly the most appropriate adjective.)

My brother and his wife rolled into town last Wednesday.  (Actually, they flew.  Can you imagine how crazy it would be if rolling across country was an actual means of transportation?  I'm getting way off track but this is the direction my mind wanders in when I have been spending a week doing nothing but chilling.  Seriously.  If I get any more chill, my pulse will slow down to a relaxed five beats per minute and I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon medically speaking.)

Dave and Jack are basically BFFLs (Best Friends for Life) so he took not just Thursday, not just Friday, but also Monday off from work!  This has been a long weekend for the record books.

We started things off with a bang.  Thursday is my mom's birthday but we kicked off the celebration on Wednesday with a night in and take out from Chipotle.  This was a wonderful sign of great things to come as we have spent the last several days chillaxing with nothing pressing and nothing scheduled.

On Thursday, we drove off to Quintana Beach where we had rented a cabin on the boardwalk.  It took us a while to realize it, but we were actually sleeping in a historic home from the 1800's.  Apparently, Quintana, as much of a ghost town as it is appears now, was one of the first places in Texas to have been explored by the famous Cabeza de Vaca.  Before hurricanes and disease wiped out most of the town's buildings and population, it was a happening summer destination for plantation owners and fancy people back in the day.  This may not sound like much, but to a history nerd, it just about made my trip.

This is the second time we have taken Katelyn to the beach and, again, she was not a fan.  I think it's the combination of the scratchy sand and the crashing waves that freaked her out.  Either way, she was just not interested, which is a shame because she looked like a legitimate surfer baby.  The Beach Boys song Surfer Girl ran on an infinite loop in my mind the entire weekend.

She spent most of her time on the shore sitting in her special baby beach chair playing with a half empty water bottle.

We celebrated my mom's actual birthday at Long John Silver's.  Things got a little crazy.  It was about an hour past bedtime and some people were getting a little punch drunk.

We spent our time at the Seaburn House playing in the warm waves, napping with the smell of the water still on our clothes, or sitting on the boardwalk in the breeze of ocean air while Kate ran around like a wild woman.

We also went out for late night walks on the beach while my parents stayed behind with sleeping Katelyn.  The breeze at night is refreshing and salty and the sand that just hours ago burned our feet flowed between our toes like a cool liquid.  Dave and I walked along the beach with Jack and Jessica and Lauren to the pier where a family was fishing in the light of the docks.  There will thousands of tiny fish that swarmed around our feet with each wave.  We had so much fun catching them and watching them swim back into the ocean.

On Friday, the air conditioning broke.  (I guess you shouldn't expect much out of a two hundred year old house.)  It took only a few minutes for the humid ocean air to feel overbearing and about an hour before conditions became intolerable.  Luckily, we got our money back and were able to pack up the car in a hurry and drive over to the air conditioned safety of Buccee's.

Sunday dinner was a "Make Your Own Mac and Cheese" Party at my parents' house.  This is a family favorite because who doesn't like pasta and cheese?  Also, even if you didn't care for pasta and cheese, I'm pretty sure you can't turn it down with fix ins like bacon and sausage, goat cheese, freshly grated parmesan, and pepperoni.

Tonight was our last night of "staycation" so we threw ourselves a pool party.  We brought the foil dinner ingredients we had planned to cook during our last night at the beach and threw everything on the grill while we played in the water.

Sitting around the picnic table, enjoying grill roasted veggies and hamburger and the sounds of an evening of family time at the pool, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness as I sensed the sun setting on the last few moments of this year's summer.  It's been a great couple months and a great couple days.  But, as sad as I am about the ending of a blissful time, I'm ready to get back into the swing of things.

And, really, I can't be too sad about everything because after summer comes fall and we all know how I feel about fall.

pool side snacks

Katelyn and I have spent such massive amounts of time at the pool this summer that tan lines crisscross our back and streaks of golden blonde color our hair.  We have a pool bag packed and ready to go at all times and Kate is daily getting into the closet to bring me swim diapers and sunscreen in hopes of a dip in the pool. We meet Lauren and the kids she watches several times a week.  We love to sit at the table under the shade and eat lunch poolside.

I have the pool time prep down to a science.  What once seemed like a tedious process of slathering sunscreen and squeezing into swim suits is now a simple task done in record time.  One of the more difficult things is actually figuring out what to eat for lunch.  It's much easier to pack ready made food like crackers and cookies but that is rarely a diet friendly option.  I saw these cucumber turkey sandwiches on Facebook and tried them last week.  They were delicious.

I partially peeled a cucumber and cut it in half.  I shook my head as I scooped out the seeds because, in my opinion, they are the best part, but I needed room for the turkey and cheese.  Instead of using high calorie, high fat cheese, I used a wedge of spreadable Laughing Cow cheese.  I would recommend drying the cucumbers off with a paper towel to help the cheese stick.  Next I put a few slices of deli sliced turkey over the cheese.  I packed some strawberries and that was that.  Lunch was ready in under five minutes.

At the pool, Kate took one bite of each strawberry and left them sitting on the table in a row.  What's up with that?

a vacation pictorial part seven

Well I guess this isn't really much of a pictorial as this is the only picture I have to commemorate yesterday's events.

This picture was taken at the baby blessing of Jon and Tina's little one Max.  It is a fitting photo as I am holding a massive cup of ice and Katelyn is refusing to cooperate.  I guess it was a sign of things to come.

Yesterday was a travel day.  We boarded a flight to Denver at 5:15 and made it home and into bed by 2:30.

No one takes the luxury of economy class flying more for granted than people traveling without children.  I remember the days when my biggest concern when boarding a plane was whether I had a pen for my crossword puzzle.  Yesterday I boarded by plane apologizing as Kate kicked nearly every passenger we passed on our way to the back of the plane.

Our flight from Salt Lake City to Denver had been delayed due to poor weather conditions in Colorado and we had to run almost a mile in under fifteen minutes to catch our connections.  A mile doesn't seem like it would be that difficult but when you are overweight and carrying a 25 pound child, trust me, it is.

Our saving grace on the flight to Salt Lake City had been Slim Jims.  We had an entire bag full of those nasty foul smelling processed beef sticks and Kate reclined across my lap and propped her feet up on Dave's shoulder eating one after another. We had the process down to a science.  One beef stick in Kate's little hand with another unwrapped at the ready and another in line after that.  It occupied her for nearly an hour.

On the flight to Denver it had been those tiny Mamba candies.  To make them last, I bit each little candy into six or seven pieces while Dave tried to keep Kate from flinging sticky little candies all over the place.

Because of the non existent layover, however, I didn't have time to buy more treats.  We had a bottle of apple juice but the real secret of toddler air travel I have learned is tiny foods.  As long as we had some sort of appealing snack that took Katelyn a million years to eat, we were fine.

One of Kate's most favorite things in the whole world is ice.  She loves to crunch ice and we have never seen her turn it down.  Airline ice, unfortunately, comes in giant pieces and is about as hard as I would imagine Arctic icicles to be.  This meant that I was on ice crunching duty.  I started by biting a piece of ice and then handing Katelyn one little bit at a time.  However, this is inefficient and the second rule of toddler air travel is efficiency so I started crunching entire cup fulls of ice at once and spitting the ice back into the cup.

At first I tried to be discreet, you know, wait until no one was looking to deposit a mouthful of masticated ice chunks into a little plastic cup.  Eventually though, I was mentally daring people to stare at me.

"Yeah, you're welcome for protecting your sanity by keeping her quiet."

By the time the plane landed I had crunched through five full cups of ice.  Finally, we landed, deplaned, drove home, walked up the stairs, showered and bathed, and crawled into bed.  I slept until noon because Dave is amazing like that.

Eventually she fell asleep for the last half hour of the flight.  She was stretched out across both of our laps on her stomach with a stuffed dog for a pillow and a blanket keeping her warm.  Dave and I both were frozen into contorted painful positions not daring to move for fear that she would wake up.  Dave tickled her back and I rubbed her feet.  We couldn't help but silently laugh to each other over our spoiled little princess.  Where we once lamented about the fact that the flight attendants rarely gave us the entire can of soda during the beverage service we were now incredibly relieved that for one short moment we could sit and enjoy our flight without wrangling toddler feet.

Despite a crazy day in the air, we had such a fun time in Utah with family.  We made some great memories and it is so sad to think about going back to the real world tomorrow.  Why can't summer vacation last forever?

a vacation pictorial part six

We went for a swim at the new Provo Recreation Center this afternoon.  It was so nice!  I'm jealous that it wasn't that nice when I lived in Provo.  The pool area was huge and was both indoor and outdoors.

First Katelyn and I stopped to visit with my Grandma for a while.

We also stopped by Jack's apartment to meet their cat Storm.  Neither Storm nor Katelyn was very happy about this photo op.

I'm not sure why we all looked so concerned in this series of pictures because we had a really fun time.

We forced Jack to go swimming with us too.

This is about as much as you can ask when posing babies for a picture I guess.