Summer fun

This pic is from our trip down to my parents' house last month. I just rediscovered it on our camera and posted it because I love it: my two girls and my awesome mama, whose own mothering I have learned so much from. Thanks Mom: you rock!

So we've had a lot going on lately. In addition to our consultation about botax and selective dorsal rhizotomy
(which I posted about here: http://galliringo.blogspot.com/2008/06/consultations.html)
we've been busy with fun summer activities like gardening, canoeing, going to parades, eating ice cream...each summer seems to get more and more fun as the girls are better able to appreciate and articulate their experiences.

Here are the girls enjoying a Memorial Day parade, northern New England small-town style, complete with tractors, old cars, fire engines and local marching bands. We went with our good friends and my sister-in-law and her two boys.

And here is our container garden and a few shots of the girls cultivating our first crop: radishes! They were really into pulling them out and but not so into eating them.


We've also been hanging in the sandbox alot, trying to encourage people not to eat or throw sand but otherwise having a great time.



When it started to get really hot, we headed down to the river at the end of our road which is a great way to cool down quickly. The girls love it there: they love to find interesting rocks, walk around in the water, check out the algae and try to skip stones with Daddy (ker-PLUNK!)
And we finally, on Father's Day, we got the girls out in the canoe. It went really well for our first time; the biggest snafu was that Hannah's life "preserber" was really annoying her as it kept coming up almost to her ears and she spent a lot of the time whining that she wanted to take it off. Other than that, they seemed to really dig being out on the water with the other boats, pretending to paddle, and helping us rescue B's shoe when it fell in!


After our paddle, we went to a beach on the same lake and spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and eating ice cream. It was a really special Father's Day.