Phelps Youth Pavilion

Today was "dollar day" at the new Phelps Youth Pavilion at the Waterloo Center for the Arts. It is an awesome new children's interactive learning center that I have been wanting to visit with Emily since it opened this spring. For $2 I figured it would be a fun way to spend a couple hours in the morning. It was pure chaos with 100+ kids and adults running around, but it was a lot of fun to watch Emily explore. She wasn't shy about anything. I can see how it will be tons of fun in the future without the big crowds and when Emily begins to "grow" into more of the exhibits. It reminded me so much of the Omaha Children's Museum I loved when I was in kindergarten.


This is a collage of Emily checking things out. She loved the "fishies" and life-like cow. I couldn't get her to try and milk it, though. ;o) She is also exploring China, digging in the "garden", fishing with magnets, going "shopping" for vegetables and crashing a play being staged by a group of random kids.

Picnic in the park

On Sunday evening we attended the Bremer County GOP fundraiser picnic at Prestien Park in Denver. It was a beautiful evening, though a bit breezy. Austin spoke along with all the other GOP candidates running for various offices from county supervisor to U.S. Senate. He did a great job! We were also privileged to have the Johnson Family Strings as the entertainment for the evening. The Johnson's are a neat home school family from rural Denver that play together as a whole family all over the area. There are six kids ages 6-17 and they are amazing! There is a short video of Emily "dancing" in the video player. I tried to tape Austin's speech, but Emily was not cooperating at all, so I finally gave up. She performed her duty of looking cute, but only ate crackers and cookies for supper. We also decided it was time to go home when she wiped out on the tennis court, spilled her "fishy" crackers and skinned both knees. :o( Luckily she was quite resilient (and tired) and almost fell asleep on the stroller ride back.

Mischievous House Elf

It has been a longer week without much interesting going on. We do, however, have a mischievous "house elf" on the loose. Three significant items have disappeared lately: my watch, one of Emily's "juice" sippy cups and one of my mixer beaters. I can't function without a watch and losing the sippy cup is significant since there are only two in that rotation and that barely suffices at times. Luckily, both items could be easily replaced at Target yesterday. The beater disappeared on the day Emily got into the cupboard that houses my mixer and a lot of big bowls. She had fun "cooking" while I was trying to juggle frying bacon, answering the phone and shutting off the smoke alarm. :op Later that night, after washing up everything she had hauled out, Austin & I couldn't find one of the beaters anywhere. Thankfully, it mysteriously reappeared as soon as Emily got up in the morning. I didn't care as long as it was back in time to bake cookies today. :o)

Field trip to PetCo

Emily & I took a little field trip to PetCo this morning to get dog food for Cheney and look at all the animals. That is some fun and cheap entertainment (except for the dog food part)! Emily called all the rodents "mice" and loved the "fishies" and "wa-er" (water) best. You can click on the picture collage to enlarge.

Poor Cheney

This is Emily's new favorite pastime. Poor Cheney!

Patriotic Girls

4th of July

Today was a big day! Austin's parents came up from Des Moines to help us out. Our first stop was the big 4th of July parade in Oelwein. It was a perfect day for a parade. What a lot of people! Dave, Cheryl & Tyler saw a lot of people they knew, so it was a lot of fun. We had a big crew and they still couldn't keep up. Emily sure liked all the "flags" and Tootsie Rolls!

We had McDonald's on the road (which Emily did VERY well with) and made a brief pit-stop at home in Denver to reload before heading up to Fredrika. Emily took a 30 min. snooze in the van before we had to wake her up to sit in the wagon. That was also a big parade for such a small town. Emily did so well the whole day and performed her role of looking cute beautifully. We got a lot of comments (and hopefully a lot of votes!) from people lining the streets.

We finally made it home by 3:30pm where everyone except Emily crashed. After being confined to either a car seat or wagon all day she was running around like crazy. She thought it was hilarious to chase Cheney around pushing her baby stroller and trying to run into him. She even caught him a few times! Then she had fun playing in the sand with Grandma Lorenzen while we grilled supper.

After Grandpa & Grandma Lorenzen left for home Austin washed the van in the driveway and I watered the flowers while Emily "helped". She had great fun playing with the water hose, sponges and splashing & dumping water in & out of the car washing bucket. By the time we went inside she was soaked from top to bottom. It was a great end to a very busy but fun day!

Happy 4th of July!

Mmm...beans

We enjoyed our first meal of fresh green beans from my experimental "garden" this summer and they were delicious! I had forgotten how much better garden fresh ones taste as opposed to "fresh" from the grocery store. Emily, of course, loved them. But she'll eat anything called a "bejable". Also, the experimental pumpkin vines are looking good. I'm excited to see what might come out of those. I love summer!

Sprinkler

It was a beautiful afternoon and we finally were able to haul out the sprinkler. Emily had a blast! She talked non-stop (see video montage). Cheney liked it too. :o) We also got out the pool to splash in. Throw in the sandbox and it's a perfect formula for fun (and a mess)! I was engrossed in trying to catch up on the daily papers and didn't notice that Emily was systematically filling her pool with sand one scoop at a time. I rescued most of it using her sieve scoop. I haven't figured out a good system for getting Emily cleaned up and inside. I ended up hosing Emily down, drying her off and then shaking out the towel and her entire changing table pad and waiting for the rest of the sand to come off in the bathtub.

Laundry Day Disaster

Nothing puts a damper on Laundry Day (other than the fact it's Laundry Day) more than running not only a Kleenex (which I do quite often), but also a tube of ChapStick through both the washer & dryer with the dark load. I did that a couple times in college with devastating results. Although the casualties were great in number, they were not the most heartbreaking items this time around. I ran a Google search last night on ways to rescue the victims but came up with a lot of conflicting information. I am currently experimenting with straight-up Dawn dish detergent with promising preliminary results. Has anyone else experienced this tragedy and recovered?