Princesses and Planes

Greetings friends and family,

We drove 14 hours to escape the AZ heat and it boils down to a decrease of 12 degrees per day. In other words... we are being blamed for bringing the heat with us from AZ to Cali. Even so, the night time lows in the 60's makes for awesome evenings and mornings. No complaints here! The twins are happy to swim every day and twice on Sunday.


Both of them discovered a new-found joy in holding their breath and going underwater. The humorous part is the timing. Layla, who typically despises being told to go under, willingly did it on her own while the arm band floaties held her up. She came up out of the water with a big, proud smile as she looked for cheering from us with approval of her accomplishment.

Easton noticed what she did and decided it was OK to do the same. He also sought the cheers from the crowd of relatives and of course we were more than happy to congratulate him on the accomplishment. Within a few minutes he was putting his head under water for 5 seconds and spinning around at the same time. They finally got the hang of it! It only took 8 weeks of swim lessons, $225, and countless hours of our encouragement. Simple accomplishment... Tons of work.

Easton and Layla are loving life at Oma and Opa's house. The first words out of their mouth every morning is, "where is Oma?" All day long it's all about the grandparents. Even at night Oma and Opa are requested to tell stories about Easton and Layla in the basement of their castle. Not sure why the story always has to revolve around that topic, but we are happy to oblige.

In the morning Easton asks to hang onto his blankie so we let him hang out before breakfast with it. He laid his head on the pillow and asked me (as always) to "cover up". You can see by his big smile he's a happy, morning person.


Layla tries her best to fit into Opa's living room chair, but she's growing too big for that already.


On Saturday we planned a huge day of Guy's time and Girl's time separately. Opa and I took Easton to the Aerospace Museum of California for a day of airplanes and space shuttles. As we expected, Easton was immediately drawn to the blue airplane, which happens to be a famous Blue Angels Skyhawk.


We were able to board 2 planes and a helicopter! Easton's favorite memory of the day was pushing the big button in the center console of the airplane as Opa sat with him.


One of the toy planes Easton really likes is a fire and rescue boat plane. When he saw this real-life one he took the opportunity to touch every component because he had some context of what it was.


Here's Easton and I looking out of the helicopter window. He was brave and strangely comfortable wandering up and down the cargo area of the aircraft.


Even though Easton's eyes are closed in the next picture, it proved to be one of the most humorous moments of the day for me. When we first walked by the airplane Easton noticed the intake opening under the nose of the plane. His unprompted comment was, "The airplane is happy!" because it looks like a smile. Like all things in life, it's all about your perspective, right?


After roaming between the planes we went inside to view the other items of interest. Even the actual astronaught space suit couldn't keep Easton's interest because he saw the park outside, which includes a space shuttle shaped play ground.


complete with a seat to mimic the cockpit of the space shuttle.


the only mishap of the day was letting Easton go down the really steep, long tunnel slide alone. He did a little rolling around in there on his way down and was scared by the time he reached Opa at the bottom. No harm... no foul. I took him back up to the top and rode down with him successfully. He didn't mind getting back on the proverbial horse.

Oma and Kendra took Layla to see the Cinderella play at the local theater. Layla was the envy of all of the little girls because of her princess crown.


Kendra described the experience as "successful" even though Layla had a little trouble staying in her seat. Her behavior was justified because the play happened to be exactly during her nap time so she didn't get one on Saturday.

Even with her finger in her nose she was thrilled to see Cinderella and have girl's time with mommy and Oma.


After church we found a local park with a waterfall and fake creek with a playground. The ice cream truck came by the park and my ears are finely tuned to the ice cream truck jingle which plays from every one of these roaming the streets. I gave Layla the powerpuff girl one and Easton the TMNT one, which melted faster than they could eat.


The melting made for a huge mess, but luckily the water park was close by so they washed off in no time.


It wasn't a "splashpad" because there wasn't water shooting up from the ground or a sprinkler system. However, the continuous waterfall gushed so much Layla never found the courage to follow the older girls into the downpour. She did a great job of convincing the girls to follow her around playing "follow the leader".


Easton was happy enough to play by himself and dump water out on the rocks.


Simple fun and all the other kids around provided a good social environment for them (and us). Kendra met some mommies there and their kids wanted to know our phone number so they could play with Layla again sometime. :) what a magnetic personality she has...

Long story for this next picture, but the short version is: I needed a bath and my swimsuit needed a wash to get the chlorine out. It also happened to be Easton and Layla's bath time. They asked me to get in the tub so I jumped in with them. They thought it was hilarious to use the washable crayons to draw on me and I love to hear them laugh so much i didn't care.


by the way, cleaning the crayons off my skin took more scrubbing than cleaning the bath tub tiles. No one can accuse me of not being involved with the kids, right?

See you soon!