TWO Birthdays Today!

This was Marina at 8:35 this a.m., at the orthodontist's office.
This is Marina at 9:15 this morning, celebrating the 'birthday' of her new smile with Dr. Tingey! Yippee!!! We are so happy to see her beautiful, shiny teeth again! Next week she will get her retainers. Now Ryker is anxiously waiting a couple more months to get his off.
Happy Birthday to my sister Darlene!

This is not a picture of her today... she's had a few more birthdays since this was taken, but she's just as cute and just as sweet, and I LOVE her!

Here we are together. How does that neat phrase go? Fate made us Sisters, Love made us Friends.

Payton's Place

On Lake Couer d'Alene in Idaho, our friends the Paytons have a wonderful get-a-way home. Natalie invited Marina and Tess to spend a long weekend there this past week. Jill took the girls out on Thursday, and these photos are from Saturday afternoon, when Kari & I arrived, along with Kari's older daughter and a friend who needed to be dropped off Sunday in Spokane @ Gonzaga University for "Washington Business Week" which is for high school kids - sort of an educational camp. They went early, and I tagged along, so we could spend one night with the girls at the lake.

The Paytons have spent the last couple years completely remodeling the interior of this house (wow, you should see the before pics and the results inside - amazing!) and now they are having all the decks re-done and plan to update the exterior soon too. I just loved what they've done - it's a beautiful place!
Natalie, Tess and Marina in the bow of the boat while we cruised the lake and they went tubing.
Nat, Marina and Tess - right after they each climbed the ladder 1/2 way up a train trestle bridge over a river that feeds into the lake, then jumped! What fun!!!

Painting Puppy Portraits

This is my first attempt at dog paintings. This is the red undercoat and dark line painted sketch of Moka. I also have one at this stage of Mufasa.
The other day I finally picked up brushes and paints and attempted to capture Biscuit's "look". I see lots of things wrong with this, but for my first ever pup portrait, I think it's not bad.

Happy 4th of July!

This year on the 4th of July, the Ghent family came over for a BBQ. They are Bob, Jill & little Owen (who is almost 3!). Jordan and Owen had lots of fun playing in our backyard - this was a quiet moment on the swing-bench.
David turned down the hot tub temp. so it would be a "warm mini pool" for some fun entertainment before dinner for Owen. That is Jill - who is expecting their 2nd child in Dec., and Bob, sitting in the tub with Jzo and David (not shown).
Marina arranged to go up to the City Commons town celebration with friends. She hung out with us long enough to enjoy our yummy dinner, and then took off. Ryker was also with friends and also ended up at the city's fireworks show, which Jzo and I walked about a mile to sit and watch from a distance.

Random "Stuff"

This was Marina on the last day of school (8th grade). She got this cute top from one of her friends for her b-day.
This is how messy our dining room has been (off & on) for almost 4 1/2 years since we created this room with a remodel. I had attempted a few years ago to finally order the glass shelves for the upper cabinets, but there were "issues".
FINALLY! The shelves arrived. Okay to be serious, I finally ordered them again, and picked them up Monday. Well, after much angst on my part, having discovered that I ordered them 1/16 too wide to accommodate the metal pegs that hold the shelves... David saved the day and suggested I buy new pegs with less 'bulk' to them. That was Monday afternoon. Yesterday I was too busy to work the project... today I realized that the middle hinge of the doors is positioned at the exact spot where I wanted one of the shelves... (trying to hide the horizontal line of glass behind the panes of the doors) but all-in-all, I am happy!

Baker Blast 6/27 - 6/29

This is Mt. Baker in the northern part of the Washington State portion of the Cascades mountain range. (fairly close to the Canadian border) This view was from the soccer fields where Jzo's team played in a tournament last weekend, called the "Baker Blast". Jzo and I could also see this mountain from our hotel room, which was about 9 miles to the west of the fields.
This is Jzo's new Crossfire team. He played with the same club last year, but got bumped up to a higher level team this season. We are really happy with this new team so far. This was their first tournament, they've been practicing 2-3 times a week since the start of April. Jzo is front row, second from the right. All these boys are between 12 and 13.
Here's Jzo in action!

This is me, and my friend Mary who's son Nick is also on this team. We are so lucky, as this year we can carpool to all the practices since their family lives in the same neighborhood as we do! SCORE One for Carpool!

Friday night, after their first game (which they WON), we got to go to the west of our hotel, and one of the team families has friends with a house on the sound... it was amazing to be there during sunset (which isn't until about 9:45) and have a bon fire on the beach.

The kids had a blast (no pun intended) making s'mores and playing with the fire. You can see a few siblings came along too, but this weekend was just Jordan and me, the rest of the family couldn't come this time. 300 miles later, we were back on Sunday, early enough to catch the championship match of the Euro Cup - Spain beat Germany, 1-0.

6th Grade Promotion 6/17/08

The theme this year for the 6th grade Promotion event was "Rockin' Into the Future" and the decorating committee did a fantastic job! The gym was enhanced with a cool rock band silhouette background behind the stage, and there were embellished, personalized record albums around the room like this one for Jordan.
The black and white photo cut-outs of each kid were super fun, they were all doing some type of "jump-dance" and they hand wrote one of their school memories on the labels. Jordan's memory was about being one of the back-up dancers for the principal's performance of a Hannah Montana song during one of this year's assemblies. (That is on You-Tube actually!)
This was Ms. Weber, Jordan's amazing teacher for 6th grade. She was the third 6th grade teacher I've experienced for my kids, none of them repeated teachers for that grade. She was talking briefly about what this class was like, and then each of them came to the mic to thank someone/people for support during the past years. Jordan thanked his parents (awe...) and his teachers.
I used his video camera to record parts of this event, as David was in no shape to attend, and these still shots were taken with that video camera too! not bad.