Ready for summer

My kids are officially ready for some warm, pool-worthy weather! Their swimsuits arrived in the mail today, along with a heap of cute shirts and flip flops for Luke...we love Old Navy sales!!! We are ready for summer! Too bad the weather calls for rain the rest of the week! :( But that didn't keep up from trying on our new digs....

What is with Luke never looking at the camera when I try to take his picture???!! Argh! Silly boy! Ellie wasn't in the mood for smiles either, so oh well! Anyway......

We're sticking around the house today, catching up on mounds of laundry and house cleaning. Luke helped me make a Body For Life pumpkin cheesecake especially for Daddy this morning. My last attempt to make a BFL dessert turned out disasterous!!! I learned that soy flour is
N-A-S-T-Y when I tried to make BFL carrot cake muffins. The batter didn't even make it into the muffin cups because when I taste-tested it, it was absolutely horrible!!! Eeeewww! It went straight down the sink. Bummer. But today's recipe (out of the BFL cookbook we have) looked (and tasted) pretty darn good! I'm excited to try it after dinner tonight. And the best part....it's SUPER healthy. Can't beat that!

Speaking of healthy....that reminds me about our weekend. On Sunday we took the kids on our first hike of the year! (Our first hike with Ellie, as a matter of fact.) Now that she is 6 months, I was able to coat her in sunscreen, and wear her in one of my carriers that works as a backpack, while Ty toted Luke in our bigger Kelty hiking backpack carrier. We wanted to stick pretty close to home, so we hit a trail in the hills behind my parent's house. We hiked for over 2 hours...Ellie snoozed most of the time and Luke even 'hiked' about a third of the way on his own. It was just so nice to get out in the sunshine and enjoy being a family. We can't wait until the kids are old enough to start camping again! We miss that so much!

Backtracking in our weekend even more, on Friday Krystal and I took our kiddos out to the Living Desert in Palm Desert for the morning. Being that both our husbands are/were out of town (Ty was at a conference all Friday and Saturday, and Will is currently on a missions trip to Costa Rica for the next 10 days), we decided a zoo trip was a good way to kill some time. The weather was great...sunny and warm, but cool in the shade, and we got to see lots of neat animals up close. Cheetah's, zebras, mexican wolves, giraffes (my favorite!) and a really cool Golden Eagle. It was much better viewing than at the Wild Animal Park, in my opinion. While the Wild Animal Park is bigger and has a greater variety of animals, The Living Desert is much more managable for toddlers. Just though you might like a little 'review' in case you're interested in checking it out. LOL! But it was very cool! We had a nice time. I have some pictures, but they are on our other camera and I don't have to cable to download them. :( Guess they'll have to wait for another time.

And looking at the clock reminds me that it is now time for me to go! I've 'fluffed' the load of laundry in the dryer like three times now. Guess I should go hang 'em up and get some other things accomplished before naptime is over! I'll see ya when I see ya! :)