Dog Days

Ahhhh, summer! It arrived a while back, but it's taken me until now to really sit back, let it sink in, and enjoy it. We go to the beach every day of the whole year practically, but in this lazy month, the water is warmer and we take the time to chill out while we are there, instead of just popping down to go for a quick swing. A few of my friends are going to Hawaii this month, and I've keep thinking, why? We've got it all here, and then some. Last weekend was the concert on the beach (which we missed because we were riding bikes) followed by fireworks (which we missed but heard while we were about to go to bed), a six-man dress-up volleyball tournament- more for the booze than the game--(which we missed because it's a boozefest), and a sandcastle building contest (which we missed as well, because Tyler just likes to destroy castles). Needless to say, the beach was busy, and at least we were down there, just not where all the action was! We did get busy playing in the water, though. This was one of the times I actually brought Tyler's suit instead of just letting him parade around naked or in a diaper. Please ignore my atrocious farmer's tan.



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This photo was taken on one of the days I let Tyler run around in just a T-shirt. He loves getting in the holes that I dig while I'm trying to build him castles, so we put him in a really BIG hole, and he didn't know what to do with himself. Then we went out to find more sand crabs to put in our bucket as I explained to Tyler that these are not the kind of crabs that we eat. Yucky!
Let's see, what else have we been doing this summer? We went to a birthday party for Emmaline and Ty, two of Tyler's friends since birth. It was chaos, but in a good way.
We are still intensely crazy about our "two choos," and we race them around the track every day with their "guys" and have them take a "sha-show" (shower under the water tank).
We pretend we're cowboys and take off our hat and yell "yeehaw!" We're giving the real cowboys a bad reputation, but so be it.
Finally, I'm trying to make a book for Tyler of all the things he does during the course of a day: eat, play, sleep, read, take a bath, etc. Here's one of the photos from the bath. Every moment with him is a Kodak moment and I wish I could hire a professional photographer to follow us around everywhere we go. I can't believe he's coming up on his 2nd birthday and he's talking and actually thinking things through. We saw a picture of a wheelbarrow in one of our books and he shouted out, "Papa!" because Papa had been giving him wheelbarrow rides in Colorado over two months ago. I'm just floored by how much he learns in a day (I guess he could have been learning more if we hadn't exposed him to the Baby Einstein DVD's, but we're not going to worry about that little report right now). On Thursday we're off to Iowa, so the next post will be all about that trip and will be filled with Uncles, cousins, and of course, Grandma!