Lately...

It just seems to get busier and busier - we're at the tail end of summer vacation, with only a few more days before Miss Mika starts school again! Where did the time go?

The girls have really enjoyed doing arts & crafts. Thanks to H., they LOVE sand art! They also played with Nuudles (gotta love those!) and painting little clay figures... (I was a little surprised that the result was not as symmetrical as I had expected...)...

I've really gotten to love the Fresh & Easy market and one of the things they have are ingredients to make your own pizza! Marika insisted that she and Daddy Dude would make the pizza. See Daddy Dude toss that pizza dough into the air!

Last Saturday, we went to the local speedway to watch the races. This was the first time we'd ever gone and it was really interesting (especially from a scientific point of view - love that Doppler Effect!). The girls seemed to have a good time, even though it was really loud. I thought it was pretty cute that one of the cars looked an awful lot like Lightning McQueen, too (bottom left, above).

And a few days ago, we were invited to join our friends when they went camping. We are novices, so we went "pseudo-camping", meaning we only drove up for a few hours. It was blissfully quiet there and so pretty. We all enjoyed playing in the stream - and I had fun looking for aquatic insects (it had been several years for me) - we found stone flies, caddis flies, and water striders.

The only bad thing? It was confirmed that Marika DOES get motion sick when we go up to the mountains. At least she didn't hurl, but it certainly didn't help that I wasn't sure how far away the campsite was and had to keep stopping to ask for directions! Whew!

And yesterday, we went back to the raspberry patch for more berries. The picking was much better this time and the girls had a good time petting the donkeys/burros that were there - they were very sweet! I was treated to a dance performance by the girls on the stage, too... we're hoping to be able to visit at least one more time before school starts...