And the Little Women
Clara and Nicolyn ended July by attending the annual Amazon picnic with Jonathan. This is an event that has become an official Big Deal among the Little Women. This year’s attractions included digging for dinosaur bones (well, little plastic dinosaurs), along with the usual bouncy houses, junk food, balloons, and live entertainment.
The Little Women celebrated Memorial Day by hiking through Seattle’s Seward Park, which graces the shores of Lake Washington.
Of course, the best part of the day was scouring the beach for rocks, and throwing many of them into the lake.
The Little Women’s newest hobby is “visiting” places around the world through Google Maps.
Clara and Nicolyn claim that this hasn’t whetted their appetite for real travel, except for visiting Disneyland and Antarctica.
Due to popular demand, the Little Women got to decorate gingerbread houses last week before Christmas. This year Jenelle baked all of the gingerbread from scratch.
This first picture shows Clara’s “house”. It looks like a diabetic nightmare, but it’s really a nativity scene. The stable collapsed before she could get started, leaving only the figures. Finding Waldo Baby Jesus is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is Annika’s castle. (Why stop at a house?) Note the drawbridge and the coat-of-arms over the portal.
This is the house that Jonathan built (or decorated, anyway). 
And this is Nicolyn’s house, which she didn’t finish in time for the photo shoot.
Jenelle topped everyone this year with her Swiss-style, two-story house. 
Note the attention to detail and the tasteful use of red M&Ms. 
Just in time for Nutcracker season, Clara and Nicolyn had their first dance recital yesterday. Their number was 13th on the program and just a few minutes long, but they lit up the stage in the way that only six-year-olds can. Here are some pictures for our readers who couldn’t be there.
Nicolyn:
Clara:
In true dancing form:
Here they are in action. Clara is second from the left, Nicolyn is on the far right.
The big finish. Clara is standing in the center, Nicolyn is standing on the far right.
With Clara and Nicolyn having finished their stint in summer school, the Little Women were ready to once again brave the Great Outdoors. They knew that the perfect place was Cape Disappointment State Park, on the southern tip of the Washington coast. The place name came from a disgruntled 18th-century explorer who missed the entrance to the Columbia River, but that didn’t worry the Little Women. After all, there was so much else to do at the Park, like . . .
Dishes!
Hunting for shells on the beach!
Sand sculptures!
One of the highlights of the three-day visit was a hike in a nearby forest. There the Little Women saw their first banana slug, in all its slimy-yellow glory. This proved to be just the first of many banana slugs on the hike, and they made a lasting impression. By the end of the hike, Nicolyn was singing her self-composed song about how she had kissed eight banana slugs.
And thus the Little Women learned that the secret to finding satisfaction at Cape Disappointment is to look for banana slugs, not the mouth of the Columbia River.
More photos are here.
To celebrate their tenth anniversary, Jenelle and Jonathan spent three days enjoying Grand Teton National Park (by themselves).
They enjoyed hiking and photographing the local wildflowers. Also, Jenelle measured the park’s magnetic pull on tourists by tracking the different license plates that they saw: 40 different US states, plus three Canadian provinces and the District of Columbia.
More pictures are here.
Annika recently celebrated her eight birthday. As a newly minted eight-year-old, she also chose to be baptized. Congratulations Annika!
To celebrate Memorial Day, Jenelle and Jonathan thought would be a great idea to escape the city and enjoy the great outdoors. To do this, they took the Little Women for a hike to Franklin Falls, on a trail that turned out to have about a thousand other people.
Fortunately, there were enough snacks to keep the three girls happy.