End of Summer weekend....

Oh summer, how we'll miss you.

We took advantage of the end of the summer and hit the town, and out of town, and some in between.

Thursday we went to one of splash parks in Folsom. It's become a staple of our summer and wish we had one closer to home.

Ta-Da!

Being my boys, they both found friends to play with and run around and before we knew it we'd been there almost 3 hours!

Friday, Keith had the day off so we packed up the car and headed down to Santa Cruz. It's a 3 hour drive, almost 4 with the 4 potty stops we made for Tyler, but we finally made it just after the rides opened.

Totally soaked after the big log ride.

After hitting up some rides we headed down for a walk and this is the look of the rides. Awesome, minus all the smoke in the air from the area fires.

On our walk down the coastline we came up on one of the local surf spots and stayed to watch for a while.

Sea lions out on the rock.

Then we headed back to the car and grabbed our beach gear so the boys could go play.

Ty found a girl his age to play with, they chased each other around for quite a while.

Cody found a boy his age as well.

The water is Cold, so they only played for maybe 30 min.

Lots of sail boats in the water to see.

We hit a local cafe for dinner, the boys had their favorite breakfast for dinner, so it was good. We left our house at 7:30am and were finally home around 10pm. Long and fun day!

Saturday evening we went to the annual Niello Dinner, although instead of the fancy dinner downtown, they did it family style at the zoo. We really enjoyed the mellow attitude of it.

The boys drawing on the doodle bug.

They each had two rides on the new carousel.

Then we took a short spin around part of the zoo on the train.

After a bbq dinner we did a scavenger hunt around the zoo, leaving Ty with black "tattoos" up and down his arms.

The boys had a treat getting to spend the night at Gma/pa's Sat night as Keith and I were maybe going to go the Indy race at Sonoma, but after such a busy weekend, we bowed out.
Instead, we went to a quite breakfast, hit up some Birthday shopping that needed to be done, then went to see Inglorious Bastards. So awesome! If you like Terantino movies at all, you'll love it, if you think you are going to a war movie and haven't seen any Terantino movies, stay away.

So there it is, busy weekend! Now getting ready for back to school on Monday.

Tyler's 3rd Birthday Party

What a day! We've been busy for the last few days, preparing the house and backyard, getting food and goodies ready all for a certain almost 3 year old. He's been excited, knowing it was coming and finally getting here today, seeing his friends, he was in heaven.

Fish and #3 cookies...

Jell-O Bars with fish floating in the middle...

Ready for the crowd...

We had an art table set up with wooden magnents to color and foam door hangers to decorate with stickers.

We set up a few areas with different water things and they had quite a good time.

Between water things, they would stop and snack on the Jell-O and goldfish, washing it down with the famous "Sizzly Lemonade."

Back out to play in the sprinkler...

Then it was time to blow out the candles and have some cookies.

We ended the party with the Nemo Pinata.

The breaking shot...

Candy!

After everyone left, we made some quick sandwiches and shipped the boys off with Grandpa. My MIL took my SIL and me out to see Julie & Julia for a bit of a quite girls afternoon. It was fabulous and just what I needed to whined down after such a busy few days. The boys had lunch by the river and then got to splash around some more before heading back in for a nap.

Once we were all home from our outings, we opened presents.

Favorite for the day was his new Mac Truck, he's been wanting one of these!

His actual Birthday is in less than 2 weeks, so we'll do it all again with family, dinner, cake and presents.

Here's a video of the party.

Birthday presents by Cricut...

Felt boards, using the Paper Dolls Dress Up cartridge.

Dinosaur scene for Russ...

For Selby: Mermaid...

Fairy and the Prince....

Princess and the Knight...

Need to work on some backgrounds, but was wanting to get the characters done in time for the party, ran out of time. Trees, clouds, grass and such to come....

Ice Cream Social at the Train Museum

One of the best gifts that the boys have been given over the last couple of years is a membership to the train museum in Old Sacramento. We can go to the museum anytime we like, they get in free and can each bring one adult in for free. We also get to attend special events like today, that was totally free. Awesome.

They had a working handcart that you could take turns on.

Unfortunately, we went from a happy Ty to a mad/sad Ty in the matter of seconds. I was taking a quick picture, above, before getting on and was going to stand behind him as I'd seen lots of other parents do with their littler ones. The train dude didn't catch on to my intentions fast enough and said he would have to ride in the middle. He wasn't at all happy about that. So instead of me trying to make the situation right, the train dude says, "Well, I won't have any temper tantrums on my time." So we quickly exited and waited for Cody and Keith to finish their ride. Jerk!

Notice boy in near tears...

But the bigger boys had a good time.

After that we headed over and found out we could get a train tattoo, complete with glitter, so that made the world right again.

Thomas and James...

Next we took a quick tour off the caboose before heading over to ride the excursion train.

The engine...

Watching them work the switch track...

Conductor reminds me of someone???

We had a nice trip up and down the river. When we were at the farthest point out, the train stopped, engine unhooked and we were able to watch it pass us as it went to connect to the other end. We had a couple of odd stops on the way back in, assumably traffic issues as we crossed some major streets, but other than that it was a great ride. Then we went over for our ice cream, tasted great on a warm day. We had packed a lunch, so was grabbed it from the car and headed to the pier for a shady spot and watched the boats go up and down the river while we ate.

We have two more weeks of summer before Cody is off to Kindergarten, I'm glad we were able to squeeze this in!

Finally gettin' crafty and the new stove...

Defiantly have not done enough crafty things this summer, pretty sure there was time, but have neglected to dig in and go. So the kick start has been crafty with a deadline, really how I work best.

My summer preschool project was to help embellish new aprons for the M/W/F class that Cody just finished in. As of recent events, his teacher is not coming back and she did purchase these, so she now has a nice set of labeled aprons. This is hand embroidery, doing a satin stitch. I also had some ribbon I was going to put on the pockets on the bottom, but didn't get that far.
The next crafty deadline was for Tyler's upcoming birthday party, here are his invites that were finished today.

The gift list is long, and hopefully I can pick through my fabric stash and come up with a few more neat things before Christmas. For sure the boys are getting their floor pillows I never finished last Christmas, and maybe some super hero capes.

The new-to-us stove is now in and seams to be functioning. True test will come over the week while I try to figure out all the buttons.

Here's a view of the old stove...

Now the matching new white...

We have a minor plug placement issue, so it's sitting off the wall about an inch and a half. But it's in and will work fine until there is time to move the massive plug.