Birthday Cake

For my birthday the children made me a cake. They did it all by themselves.

Emilie made sure that the mixer was doing a good job ;)

The Pyramid

There is a new park in Saratoga Springs with a 30 ft high (almost 10 m) climbing pyramid. We headed up there with some of our neighbors and the kids had lots of fun. Thomas didn't get higher than about 6 - 8 feet and then got nervous. Luckily there were lots of girls from our group who loved to "save" him so I didn't have to climb up myself. Elizabeth made it all the way to the top seven times.

Hot hot hot

There is little relief of the hot weather outside so we tend to spend the majority of our time inside. If we do go out we love to go to park with the stream. It's nice and refreshing and on top of that it is totally in the shade.  They love to throw rocks, run around, get wet, get wet and just have fun.

Cedar Hills Candy Parade and Bird houses

We celebrated the Cedar Hills Family Festival and one of the festivities is a parade. We are lucky enough to have it come right by our house (other wise we most likely would not have attended). We call it the "Candy Parade" because the kids get tons of  candy. Thomas decided that it was more comfortable to sit in his dump truck than on his chair and Emilie was all over the candy.

One of the things the kids got from Home Depot was a Bird House kit and an apron. Babi and Grandpa came over for dinner that night so grandpa helped the kids construct their houses. Elizabeth did most of it herself.

A few days later they painted their houses. 

Here is the end result. They turned out really cute. Now we just have to find a good place to hang them.

Artisan Pizza

For several years I've been making this artisan bread. It is so simple to make and so delicious. We'll my sister in law told me about a artisan pizza dough recipe and I found out it was the same recipe. I decided to try it out and it was delicious (restaurant quality). The directions for the pizza dough are found here. We loved the pizza and will be using this recipe from now on. The pizza only took about 6 min to cook. My mouth is starting to water as I am thinking about it.

Lemonade stand

After showing Thomas a little video about children doing a lemonade stand he insisted on doing one himself. After making the signs and buying the supplies the kids were ready to go.

They had so much fun doing this stand. They had their first customer even before they were completely set up. They would dance and wave their signs at every car that would come by. People were very generous and nice to them. Grandpa and Babi and Leslie even came by to support them and Opa and Oma from the Netherlands sent them some money to support them. It was a fun experience for them. 

They were quite excited to have some money of their own and decided they wanted to go get some shaved ice.

Colorado - Part 3

On Thursday we visited Rocky Mountain National Park. We first had a little picnic and after that we took the bus up to Bear Lake and walked around the lake. It was a great little hike for the little kids.

Leslie got Junior Ranger booklets for the children which kept them busy, entertained and educated during the hike.

We even saw a water snake.

The kids got ranger badges at the end of the hike.

To finish of the day we went to Estes park and let the kids go down the big slides.

Emilie was quite sad and upset when it was over she kept signing MORE.