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Younger Daughter celebrated her 8th birthday today!

Weekend of Water Fun

Some friends of ours have a lake cottage that has been in their family for 3 or 4 generations. (It was either our friend's grandfather or great-grandfather who built it.) They invited us to spend Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend there with them. We've been there with them before, and we jumped at the chance to go again!

Saturday was pretty cool, but some of the older kids were brave enough to do some tubing.





Meanwhile, some of the younger kids were just thrilled to ride along in the speedboat.

(Oldest Son was trying to warm up after tubing.)


When not tubing the kids spent much of the time in and out of the paddleboat, canoe, and docked pontoon boat. The cottage's lake frontage is wonderful for kids because you can walk out 100 ft, and the water is still only about 5 ft deep ... very shallow. However, we did have the kids wear life preservers when playing around by the shore, on the pier, and in the boats.

The Oldest and Oldest Son taking some of the younger kids for a canoe ride


Attack of the water gun soldiers!




The weather was warmer on Sunday, and all of the kids except for the Youngest took turns riding on the "hot dog." We adults and the kids who weren't riding the hot dog enjoyed cruising on the pontoon boat as it pulled the hot dog behind.




(This one is my entry into Paper Mama's "Excitement" photo challenge.)





Some of the kids even got to spend some time fishing off the pier and some of the docked boats.







What an awesome, fun weekend!

First Day of Preschool

Today was the Youngest's first day of preschool. He was so excited to go!

Happy to Be Four

The Youngest celebrated his fourth birthday at the beginning of this month. He was SO happy and excited to be turning four!

When asked before his birthday what kind of cake he wanted, he said, "Lellow." Frosting? "Lellow." Anything else on the cake? "No, just lellow." So a yellow cake with yellow frosting it was!


Notice he is wearing a yellow shirt. We even put yellow candles on the cake even though they're not in this picture. Bet you can't guess his favorite color! ;)

Today is Faith at Simplicity's birthday, and her photo challenge theme for the week is "Birthday." Be sure to head on over and wish her a happy birthday as well as check out all the other birthday pics.

First Day of School

Yesterday was the first day of the new school year for the 4 older kiddos. Just like my mom always did, I take a pic of the kids on their first day every year. Here's this year's edition:


Left to right: Younger Daughter - 1st gr; Oldest - 6th gr; Middle Child - 3rd gr; Oldest Son - 5th gr

The Youngest was not happy that it wasn't his first day of school, too, but his first day of preschool doesn't start til next week Wednesday.

Sparkler

The Thursday Challenge for this week: "HOT" (High Temperature, Campfire, Stove, Oven, Sun, Hot Air Balloon,...)

Well, sparklers have fire, and fire is hot, so that's my reasoning behind submitting this pic I took of Hubby making a figure 8 with a sparkler during our 4th of July celebration. (And, of course, I think Hubby's pretty "HOT", too!) ;)



I set the camera to have a longer exposure time in order to get the streaks. It's one of my first times experimenting with trying to capture the fire trails made by sparklers and fireworks. I know this pic isn't the greatest because of the funny spots in the middle and upper left portion, but I do like how the trails of fire turned out.

Go to the Thursday Challenge to see more "HOT" images.

Eight

Middle Child celebrated his 8th birthday this past week.


I'm not sure how many Star Wars figures he put on his cake, but we had to be sure to place the candles carefully so that none of the figures burned!

"Black and White" is this week's theme at You Capture. Click on the link to see more black and white pics.