aligator drawing

pet store

Hey Zoe, let's go in here.
> what store is this?
It's a pet store.

Let's see if there is something in here that we need to get for Coco.
> yeah, like a cat!

[FYI, Zoe wants a cat now.]

{me too}

Cloud King + Rainbow

I thought there was a way to rotate this, but I'm not seeing it.
Zoe drew this today. I love it. This is what she told me:

It is a picture of her wearing a rainbow shirt standing under a sparkly rainbow.
She is thinking about the clouds and the sun.
The clouds have hearts by them and are thinking about the suns.
The suns have hearts by them are are thinking about the clouds.
The rainbow lines on the top of the rainbow show you what colors are there.
Above the lines is the Cloud King.

Zoe wishes that we could slide down a rainbow.
And she wishes that she could fly.

orange juice

Zoe drew a recipe for orange juice.

We went to the fruit stand and picked out exactly 3 oranges.

We set up the juicer.

Voila!

It was so delicious!

Zoe took this one little sip and that was it. Pete & I drank the rest.

foods

Pete & I made the BEST french fries! I cut them on my mandoline and then fried them twice, testing different times until they were perfect.

BBQ turkey sliders

I made dill pickles! Will be dill-icious in the fall...

Today I made strawberry-jalapeno-tequila jam.

Pete said that "jalaberry" is a better name than "strawpeno"

Portland weekend

We went back to Portland for the weekend and Pete fixed the Yarn Garden's air conditioner. It was 100 degrees there all weekend. We had a nice time in the hotel and inside restaurants. We checked the mail when we left for our trip and there were some new workbooks from Grandpa with mazes & crosswords - perfect timing!

really?

Mom?
>yes
I just put butter on this painting?
> What? Why did you do that?
I had this butter and I put it on the painting so now there's butter on it.

Strider

While at the lake I took Zoe on a hike through the woods and when we finally made it back to the actual trail we, at first, found Annie at the big log / swimming hole. We sat there for a long time with our toes in the water. Annie used to swim there while her grandma watched from the log.




When we decided to head back to where the family was gathering we found this gorgeous, red horse tied to a tree on the trail. A very woodsy, old man was sitting in the trees, looking at a map and eating his sandwich.  The horse's name was Strider and he was very gentle and good with kids. Another man was admiring the horse and it turned out that he also had a little grand-daughter named Zoe and he was there for Pete's grandpa's memorial. He told me that Strider is a Tennessee Walker and was very impressed by how well-behaved he was. This man used to be a horse [rancher?] man himself and got a little choked up talking about it and he just kind of walked away from us. Horses will do that to people, I guess.

Zoe LOVES horses. Almost as much as she loves unicorns. She begged me to ride Strider but it wasn't really that kind of encounter and the woodsy man sitting amongst the trees didn't offer so we moved on with promises to someday go to a ranch and learn to ride a horse.

If you look through the pictures in the Odell slideshow you'll see that Zoe is wearing [one of] her horse shirts the next day.

The pretty pink dress that she has on here was sent from Grandpa - thanks! Zoe says "I wish I could wear that beautiful, sparkly, pink dress!" whenever she wants to put it on. We now have some sparkly shoes to go with it.

Odell Lake photos

A link to all of the photos I took at Odell Lake last weekend. I haven't edited this slideshow so there are a lot of duplicates and probably some things not really worth looking at.

You shouldn't have to sign in to view them, but if you have a hotmail/live/MSN email & want to, I think you might get more viewing options. I don't know.

Let me know if you have trouble viewing.