Beach Babes

It's a miracle, but we finally got the entire family, including the dogs, to the beach for a weekend. The weather was beautiful, a little cloudy, but warm and very pleasant. Lacey practiced her golf swing out in the yard. She actually sent one of her hits into the dunes! I'm not good at distance, but I'd guess 75 to 100 feet.

Erik went to the local fish market and bought items for the boy feast. Here's Seth with his dinner. And the boys getting ready to dive in. (It's root beer in the wine glass) :-)Unfortnately, Seth talks big, but he actually only ate the fish, he sent the crab, clams and oysters to Erik instead of trying them. I think he would have liked the steamer clams if he had tried them, but it didn't happen.

On Sunday, it was time to take Lily to the beach for her very first time. She was excited about riding in the truck with the kids but as it turned out she is not very much into the beach. She was a bit of a wuss. She was skittish about the waves coming in, scared to death when she stepped on a piece of beachwood under the sand and the other end popped up, and was not impressed with the fact vehicles are allowed on the beach. Within 15 minutes, she drug Erik back to the truck and begged to get in!Even though Lily was not enthralled with her beach experience, she made up for it by being beautiful! Is this a pretty girl or what?

The kids had a great time playing in the water. They took off running with the pant legs rolled up and enjoyed letting the water swirl around their ankles. You can tell by the lack of coats, that the weather was very nice.

The incoming tide dictated when it was time to head back to the house, we decided getting the truck stuck on the beach is not our idea of fun. On our way back, we drove by this pelican hanging out with the seagulls.

Bowl, Baby, Bowl

Wow! Seth had a great day bowling! During league play, he bowled right around his average -- a 76 and an 82. Then, he wanted to continue bowling by himself while he waited for the other lanes to finish. He bowled an 88, 91 and 115! Typically any games after the third game start to go downhill because he gets tired. But, check this out -- this is his fifth game!

This game would have been way higher, but you can see where he lost the momentum in the 7th frame. He was really on a roll for those first six frames! It would be awesome if he could bowl like this during regionals, I could see him adding a gold medal to his collection. Stay tuned....

Fun at the Beach

We ventured to the beach for Saturday night expecting the weather to be rather drizzly and cool. This picture was taken about 2:00 on Saturday and it was easily shorts and tank top kind of weather.
On Sunday, we had cloudy conditions but it was still quite comfortable. Tenley and Lacey enjoyed riding "the bug".
Lacey insisted on riding this ride, but after it got going, she was not very happy about her decision. DeeDee is definitely thinking twice about it too and Seth is having the time of his life!
Apparently the weather at home was monsooning and downright awful. Looks like we made the right choice!

Nelson's Birthday

The kids and I, along with my co-worker Jennifer and her baby Logan, went to Jill and Shayne's to celebrate Nelson's (Nellie) first birthday. She squealed with delight with every toy that made noise, and sported some pretty good dance moves too. I have never seen a one year old handle the huge crowd and overwhelming stimuli so well; it didn't seem to faze her one bit.

Logan had a great time eating an enormous chocolate cupcake and managed to share the joy by getting chocolate cake and frosting all over his mom and himself!
I tried to talk Seth into eating his cupcake with a fork, but he informed me that he was going to "eat it like a man". He watched Grover eat the cupcake this way, so he figured if Grover could do it, then so could he.
At the end of the party, Nellie showed us how she had the whole birthday thing "in the bag".
Thank you for inviting us to share this day!

Wow!

I had to share what I saw tonight. I was sitting in my chair working on the computer and I looked up and saw this beautiful site! I went and grabbed the camera quickly before it got away from me. What do you think?



Even as brilliant as the colors in these photos appear, the intensity of the colors were ten-fold in real life. I love sunsets! It was worth the mosquito feeding frenzy that occurred on my arms and legs while taking the photos.

Splish, splash, we're having a blast!

The last two days the kids and I have been in Boise playing in the waterpark - Roaring Springs. On Saturday we played for about 7 hours and even though we had sunscreen on, we all got quite burned. I later realized that the sunscreen I was using was water resistant, not waterproof. The temp reached 96 and there we were offering our skin to the UV rays! Needless to say, I bought waterproof sunscreen today and that, along with temps of only 86, made for a much more comfortable day. Here's Seth playing in the spray area, waiting for the bucket to dump:

On Sunday, we met up with some friends we met at the CHASA retreat at the Great Wolf Lodge. This is Maggie and Lacey. Lacey had just come down the blue slide and her hair was pushed over her face. Maggie didn't like this slide but she made Lacey get over her fears of the other slides as you can see in the next picture.
This is Lacey and Maggie as they came down the "family" slide. They were nearly the last people allowed to go down this slide since the park closed at 8:00 and this picture was taken about 7:55. Once Lacey got brave enough to go down the slide, she wanted to do it over and over again. I had predicted this very scenario earlier in the day and sure enough I was right. Thank you Maggie for getting Lacey to do the rides!
There are a couple more pictures on the Picasa site. Unfortunately, I didn't get very many because I was in the water quite a bit. Also, I have hardly any of Seth because he was always with me if I went in the wave pool or lazy river. He had a great time though and has already fallen asleep about 15 minutes into his new movie. I'd say it had something to do with the movie being boring, but if you know Seth, you know he can watch the dumbest movies and think they are totally entertaining, so.....I'm betting it's all the fun he had!

Southern California!

Yesterday, we arrived home from Disneyland and San Diego. My plan, of course, was to post pictures while we were there, but we were on the run from 6:30 in the morning until midnight almost every night. We packed a lot of activity into 5 days! Our flight to LA was as nice as a flight can be (I'm not a fan, but I just grit my teeth and bear it). There were extra seats on our plane on the way down so Coconut and Black Dog got a seat to themselves. Lacey insists on buckling them in whenever possible. = )

We started our vacation in California Adventure because two years ago, we did not get to spend much time there and it was raining. Lacey and Seth enjoyed their time in this playground area that had these rope bridges and ramps that were as far as three stories above the ground.

This time the weather was hot, hot, hot, but it made for beautiful evenings. This is looking out from the pier at the sun dial carousel and the swing ride in the orange. Behind the sundial is the Maliboomer (looks like three towers). Seth and Erik rode this ride, you zoom up to the top in about 2 seconds and then bounce similar to being on a bungee. There is a video on the picasa site http://picasaweb.google.com/familyhendrickson/ . As you can probably imagine, I was holding my breath and cringing the entire time they did this ride -- scariest 30 seconds of my life. = )

Next was the electric parade. I have uploaded videos of this too and they turned out really nice. Everything about this parade was gorgeous, I could have watched it for hours.

Lacey was able to get a few signatures for her autograph book. Here she is with Cruella DeVille. She also got Cinderella, Fairy Godmother, Jasmine and Sulley.

Seth wanted to pose under this Indiana Jones sign. Unfortunately, we got two different fast passes for this ride, and still were unable to get on it because something always happened during the hour of our fast pass. Oh well, we will have to wait until next time.

On Friday night, Lacey and I did the wait for the fireworks by getting up close to the castle. We watched the show from Main Street the night before but Lacey couldn't see how the castle changes colors so on Friday we waited it out and got some good pictures too. Erik and Seth got bored waiting so they left and rode rides.

After three days in Disneyland/Anaheim, we headed for San Diego and went to Sea World. Seth and Lacey were third in line to get their picture taken with a Clydesdale. We watched him getting all prettied up for the event too and looked through their stables. I have a couple hundred pictures of Sea World and events from that day, but this was a unique picture of a flamingo. You must check out the flamingo video posted under the Sea World album on Picasa! We caught some bullying flamingos -- just watch -- you'll see what I mean.
Tuesday we only had a little time and probably should have done the zoo instead of the Wild Animal Park, but we did go on the Journey to Africa tour and got up close and personal with this lion. Unfortunately, Seth was just about wiped out after 4 days of walking, not to mention the "feels like" temp had to be about 120 degrees! Not exaggerating. While on the Journey to Africa tour, we truly felt like we were in the middle of Africa, complete with flies, smell, etc.

Well, this is long and only a sampling of the 530 pictures and videos that I took. If you want to look at all the pictures, sit down with a nice cup of coffee and use the slideshow.

Enjoying the sun!

I just had to share recent pictures of our babies. Here's Lily enjoying a twig:

And Chloe chewing on a leaf and enjoying the cool grass:
Aren't they the cutest?!

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

At Taylor's birthday party last week, we had all of the little ones together and got the cutest pictures of them doing See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. Actually, we were trying to just entertain them and keep them all corraled in one place, but the result was adorable, don't ya think?

Cast for Kids Day!

Today was one of our favorite events of the summer. It was Cast for Kids Day at Merwin Park. Cast for Kids is an event at the Merwin Fish Hatchery for children of various abilities to catch fish and have a lot of fun. This is our fourth year, and as always, we had a fabulous time. Upon arriving we were greeted by a volunteer, given a T-shirt, a fishing pole and a tackle box with everything we needed, then it was off to the ponds. As you can sort of see in this picture, the ponds were stocked!

This was the first catch of the day -- 3 1/2 pounds!
This is the entire catch, a total of 14.2 pounds.

One of the most incredible parts of the day is after you have your catch (5 fish), they clean and bag the fish for you!
Thank you very much Cast for Kids! A wonderful event once again. Click here to see all of the pictures.