Phone photos

With the amount Christina has been forgetting the camera lately some of the only pictures we have of what we've been up to is from our phones.  The pictures are uneven, but they show what we've been up to lately.

One thing we've been up to for months now are those crazy claw machines in grocery stores, malls, and arcades. Clara is oddly good at them, and often can get a toy out.  Elena really never has, and most of the time we just dump money into the machine and work on not being disappointed.

Our last dinner at the east coast was one of Christina's favorite childhood restaurants - Friendly's!  We all got sundaes, as they are more known for their ice cream than anything else.

 

Not sure if this will show up, but here is a video of Elena hula-hooping.  We started going to a kid's climbing wall, and while it's very fun the favorite thing for Elena is using these hula hoops.  She is really good - later on at home she was doing this while crossing her arms.  We told her she looked like a genie, and she said: "You can call me Jeannie!"

Steve is excellent at making flatbreads on the grill, and it is a frequent request from all of this in the household.  Elena is apprenticing to him, and has gotten pretty good at it herself!

Both girls love riding on tractors whenever we are in a store selling them (which is often, around here).  Clara especially cannot get enough, and always has to get cut off from jumping from tractor to tractor.

Last week we went out to support one of our favorite local artists, Tom Catmull.  We listen to his music with some regularity, so the girls know his music.  When we walked in for his first set Clara waltzed right up and said: "Hiiiii, Tom!" and then sat down right in front of him at the table nearest the stage.  She was a very sweet little groupie, and Tom told us later that she totally made the show for him.

We signed the girls up again for the kids club that the local baseball team (the Missoula Osprey) put on.  They get tickets to every Sunday home game, and we all really enjoy going.

This time Elena was determined to catch a fly ball (though it didn't happen she waited very patiently for most of the game).

 

Clara was absolutely obsessed with a new mascot for the ballpark - Captain Clean-up!  He is supposed to get kids excited about cleaning up litter, and it absolutely worked.  He saw Clara pick something up off the floor and put it in the trash and he gave her and Elena signed baseball.  From that moment on she tracked him around the stadium, hugging and high-fiving him everytime he turned around towards here.  Total adoration!

Steve bought the girls blueberry icees - check out the blue-tongue girls!

 

We got word this week that good friends (one of their daughters' was in preschool with Clara and Elena) are moving out of town.  We had a goodbye hot-chocolate with them at the coffeeshop (you can't quite see the fourth girl in the back!).  We also started a really fun scavenger hunt put on by a local bookstore - they hid Waldos (of Where's Waldo) in twenty downtown businesses, and we went around trying to find him.

We have almost no pictures of the fourth of July - we went to a friend's house and the girls were able to stay up to watch the fireworks at about 10:30.  Here is Elena, snuggled in a sleeping bag with her friend Jack.

On Saturday we took the trolley for our first time to get to our local farmer's market - it had been a goal of the girls' and it turned out to be a relatively easy one to realize.

At the market we bought kale, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, and our sweet-toothed-girls favorite - doughnuts!

We finished up finding Waldo on our own - our last stop was the frozen yogurt store, and we then entered ourselves into a drawing for the contest prize - fingers crossed!

Elena had a spur-of-the-moment desire to go try on those "five finger" shoes - man are they hard to get on a kid!  She loves them and wants to own them - Christina said no as she has no desire to try to wrangle that on her foot for twenty minutes every morning!

Steve has been working hard this week getting ready to go to a conference soon.  One day when he had been at work the whole weekend day we tempted him downtown with these nachos.  Well, we thought we were tempting him - looks like there was a little girl who enjoyed them a whole lot herself (especially the sour cream part!).

Finally, Clara has been asking to have her face painted for weeks now.  This weekend we let up and said yes, and so here is our colorful cat and our fancy dolphin (don't worry if you don't see much resemblance on either front - this particular face painter is a doozy!).