some pictures this time!

This has been a quiet week, which is a good thing, I think. The kids have had swimming lessons almost every day; Dan continues to work long hours on his summer class (only two more days!); and Andrew continues to be vigilant in reporting any and all summer produce from our garden. Despite neglecting it for a month or more in May and June, we actually have a few things that survived. We were thrilled to find that instead of two zucchini plants, we actually had a cucumber plant and a zucchini plant, both of which are thriving. The raspberries are doing well, and the plums are coming on beautifully. It also looks like we'll have some peaches, eggplants, and possibly some peppers in the next few weeks. It's fun to see how excited Andrew gets--even if he only reluctantly eats the actual produce (well, raspberries excepted, of course).

On Friday of this week we went to the "lake" (a man-made pond behind the aquatic center) with some friends. I thought the water was too cold, but the kids seemed to enjoy it.


We also finally discovered who Andrew's kindergarten teacher is. (One of the teachers in my ward told me they'd post the kindergarten class lists on the door of the school, so I've been checking religiously. On Wednesday, the lists were finally up.) Andrew's new teacher is Mrs. Ekker. I've heard good things about her, but Andrew wasn't so thrilled about this, since most of his friends are in Mrs. Wood's class--and Mrs. Wood is in our ward, and in the primary, so Andrew was really hoping he'd be in her class. In fact, he sat down on the grass and cried for a while after he found out. He seems okay with it now--and I imagine he'll be better about it after he meets his teacher.

Since I don't have a lot of other news, I thought I'd finally post the pictures we've been hoarding the last three weeks or so.

The kids in their Sunday clothes:




The buffalo (excuse me, American bison) that we saw just outside Dan's cousin Jon's place two weeks ago.
Some pictures from the 24th of July parade:




Evelyn makes me laugh. She was dancing to the music just before this particular shot: can you tell?

A Chinese dragon--part of a "float" (we use the term loosely here) for some sort of international arts exchange program.
The "haka." Poppy tells us Bubby can do a mean haka, but she wouldn't (strangely enough) perform one then.


And finally, Dan's birthday cake, a particularly rich German chocolate cake. Unfortunately, I didn't know that Bubby had ordered a DQ cake when I made this, so I ended up sending it to work with Dan, since we couldn't eat it on our own. (We tried to get the neighbors to help, but Alisa is off chocolate because it upsets the baby and Todd doesn't like coconut, so . . .) Needless to say, it was very good--if rich!