Beach and Parties

But first, coloring. My son actually enjoys coloring with the most permanent of coloring utensils, the marker. He especially likes grinding the point into the paper to cause the most amount of ink possible in a certain dot of space. On this day, he had chosen the orange marker and tried, with sound effects, to pop open the cap. All of a sudden, it exploded open and caused him to age in mere seconds-an automatic mustache. I'll admit, part of me wanted to draw in the other side but I'm glad I didn't. He had remnants of what I couldn't wash off the rest of the day. He was pretty proud of himself.The beach is somewhere we haven't been this entire summer. For reasons I don't even need to go into with my mom friends, there are just some places that the anxiety level climbs to mere astronomical proportions and the beach is one of them. I choose to keep the 5 years it would take off of my life by staying home. However, now that my cousin, Cheryl, is in town, it seems a lot more doable to go to the beach with 2 children and return with the same 2 children in tow. We chose a small beach in Huntington Harbor area and were the only ones there for a while. The kids had fun in the sand, the water and the play equipment. Tyler spent half of his time grabbing fistfuls of sand and throwing them into the water. Don't pay attention to his pink sand shoes. I don't have any that fit him and Mikayla had an extra pair. If you think that's girly, you should be aware that one of his favorite movies is the Barbie: 12 Dancing Princesses. To balance that a little, he does enjoy cars and the movie Cars as well. He's just well-rounded.

Here is Cheryl pushing both kids on the swings while I manned the cameras.

I thought it would be such a great idea to get a picture of me 27 weeks pregnant with my 2 other offspring but the kids decided that today wasn't their picture day. Not to mention, me at 27 weeks pregnant, in a bathing suit, is enough to say to myself, "now, why would you put yourself in front of the camera looking like that??" Thus, the reason that you only see the top half of my venture. Thanks, Cheryl, for trying. It was going to go in the baby's scrapbook but we'll have to come up with a more flattering outfit for that lifelong memory.

We just attended a 1 year old party for Ellia, one of my friend's kids from the newspaper I worked at. It was so much fun and such good weather, considering it was over 100 last weekend. People actually played softball!! I didn't take too many pictures but this one was just too cute. My friend, Susanna's little girl, Cami, and Tyler were playing with a football that was almost as big as they were. Everything went well until my little sumo wrestler accidentally knocked Cami down to the ground in his clumsy attempt to get the ball. He felt so bad he had to be held for a while but that was the only hitch in the play plans. We had fun, Talitha. The food was awesome, Jimmy!!