Today Lillie turned 3 years old! She requested a fish themed birthday party.

When she woke up, the house had been decorated in the night and there was a present for her to open on the table.

It is a barn like the one she loves to play with at her friend’s house…

We decorated the house like it was underwater. All of the ballons had a piece of candy, clips or another small item. The kids got to go around and pop the “bubbles” and get treats out of them. It was Sophie’s idea as she still might be traumatized by the pinata incident of her third birthday. Ballons are much easier to open, provide a more appropriate amount of candy and are very, very loud.

Mommy made this wonderful aquarium cake, just as Lillie requested…

Another game we played at the party is fishing paper-cliped fish with a magnetic fishing pole. The fish each had a small sheet of stickers for the girls. Lillie’s next-door friend, Lyla, came over to play and celebrate with us. And Coco wanted to catch the string and the fish in the tray.

Lillie got some wonderful gifts, including this one, a really china tea set from GranMolly and Gromper. She loved each one of her presents and handled all of the excitement very well.

Happy Birthday, Lillian. We love you so much!!!

I got some pictures of Mima and the girls about a year ago, but they just never got posted. I’ve been promising Mima that I would get them up, and today I finally am! Only about 13 months after we took them…..

Sophie and I decided that before the summer ended we needed to get one more good day at the beach. We left Lillie and Becky in Eugene and spent an entire day goofing around on the coast. We spent most of our time building a sand-castle and playing in the waves at Devil’s elbow. The Oregon coast is not usually all that warm, even in the summer, but we were sheltered from the wind and it actually ended up getting pretty hot.

On previous trips to the beach it has always been a little bit cold, and Sophie has never really gotten into playing in the waves. This trip was warm enough and the waves were calm enough that we had a great time running in and out of the water. We must have spent an hour or more just chasing the waves.

After we got tired of the beach we hiked up to the old light-house. It may not look like much, but it was actually pretty neat on the inside and we got to take a tour of it and go up into the tower.

After the light-house we drove back down to Florence where we stopped on the waterfront for a bowl of clam chowder before driving home. It was a great day.

Veronica and Efrain stopped in Portland after their Alaskan cruise, so we all got a chance to stay at Mima’s and visit with them. I didn’t get any decent pictures of Efrain because he was usually behind his own camera, but here are some pictures of everyone else.

Veronica and Becky:

The girls were happy to see their aunt. Lillie took a little while to warm up, but ended up thinking that Veronica is pretty okay. The necklaces they have on were gifts from Veronica and Efrain:

Our family got to stay out in the motor home, which Sophie and Lillie thought was just the coolest thing ever. They spent all their time playing out there, but I didn’t get many good pictures of them. Here’s a picture of Sophie hanging off the top bunk

On Saturday we drove out past Beaverton (no small drive from Vancouver) to see Nick compete in a tractor pull. Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures of Nick on the shiny purple “Dirtinator”, but we had a good time watching him compete.

We also finally got some good pictures of the family. Here’s Mima with her girls

And with Becky and Sophie (Lillie refused to be in the picture):

and finally, a decent picture of my family:

It has been a long time since the last update, but that’s just because we’ve been having a busy summer. Lots of little things going on, plus spending a lot of time playing with the kittens.

The cats are 14 weeks old now and are much bigger than when most of these pictures were taken. They spend a lot of their time sleeping — as cats are wont to do — but they need the sleep because the girls play with them a _lot_.

Coco was not as weaned as we’d been lead to believe when we adopted him, but Sophie didn’t mind, she liked bottle feeding him. He clearly didn’t suffer from missing his momma, he’s on his way to being a very big, sleek cat.

Both the cats are tolerant of being treated like babies. They actually seem to like sleeping in cribs and being carried. It is remarkable really, I think some dolls would object to some of the treatment they get….