A dress for every occasion

I was starting to wash the glass doors when the girls insisted on helping. But Joshi had to run up and change first She has to put on her "raggy Cinderella" dress. You know the one before the ball.

2 years of Tyranny

And we we're extremely happy to celebrate the 2nd year of having Billi home from Ethiopia. We went into Portland so we could go to a fancy Ethiopian restaurant. First, we stopped to pick up our friends the Larrisons. Notice from the photos how an evening for Billi goes. A quick run threw the sprinkler- Billi uses it for a weapon. Then change into Ethiopian dresses for dinner. Just before that photo, Billi had dropped a full lemonade all over the floor. Then in Billis world, the crazed Portland homeless come up offering to make balloon animals. Its good to be a 2 yr old Tyrant.

Baileys Sleepover

sprinkler trampoline

pre-school playground

1st art project of the evening

Joshi got to have a friend sleep over last night. It was a rousing success. We started the evening with an art project drawing on our sliding glass doors. Then we went to the local playground . And then to Subway for dinner. It was pretty cold but the girls we up for a round of sprinkler trampoline. Warmed up with a bubble bath, then cooled down with an ice cream sundae.

Here are the girls hard at work on their second art project, painting wooden wands.

Then we we created ice cream Sundaes in waffle cone bowls. They actually didn't eat that much of these. I think they wanted to make sure they left room for all the Cheetos they planned to eat during the movies.


Joshi and and Baily finally ditched Billi(the 2 yr old pest) when she fell asleep in my bed at 9:30. I really don't even know when the party officially ended because I fell asleep before them. But I think it was close to midnight. But I was awoken by little voices at 7 am. So much for sleeping in.

Empty Nest Syndrome

This is the daddy bird keeping an eye on the box in the tree with his baby bird.

And below is baby bird still alive after the big storm =0)

Well I really didn't think I'd be experiencing empty nest syndrome until the girls left for college but I got a literal case of it this morning. It all started Friday when I heard the girls getting serious on the back deck in their adventure play. It turned out they were throwing rocks at our cat to keep it from eatting a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Since here in the Cascades, trees are 100's of feet off the ground, we couldn't exactly find the nest and return the bird. We could see the daddy bird staying near by singing. At one point I held the baby bird up and he flew and hovered near us to see the baby. When Elwood came home he got a ladder and put a little nest as far up as he could in a nearby tree. The dady bird fed him almost immediatly. From our bird book we figured they were Western Tanagers. That night we had lightning/thunder storm -not normal for here). I was quite happy to scale the ladder and see my little bird alive Saturday morning. This morning, however, I was worried I didn't hear him peeping. When I got to the top of the ladder I was shocked to see an empty nest. I guess our little guy figured out how to fly.