Catching up Again

I don't know how people have time to keep up on blogs. I had a grand idea to update this on Sunday afternoons, but somehow those have gotten busy, too. Jenny uses the post-church naptime hour to write to her brother on his mission in Sweden, and after that the kids wake up and it's play time. Anyway, excuses aside, here are some photos to catch you up on part of our summer.

The biggest event of the summer for us was an extended Draper family trip to Southern California. My youngest brother, Neil, came home from his mission (Cincinnati, Spanish-speaking) on the 1st of July. He had left for his mission about a month before my other brother, Ben, returned from his own mission in August 2007.



So, to celebrate my family being all together for the first time in about four years, my parents (mostly) paid for all of us to go to Southern California for a few days, for our first Draper family vacation in a really, really long time. We spent a day and a half in San Diego, and a day and half in Los Angeles. The main reason for the trip to California was that the Cubs were on a West Coast road trip, so my brothers and Dad went to see them one night in San Diego against the Padres, and then took the whole family to see them the next night at Dodger Stadium.




Here are my brothers and I enacting the inside joke of the week, which, namely, is that all Asian and South American people flash the peace sign in all of the many, many pictures they take. OK, that's a rude over-generalization, but you've got to admit that's funny.

Turns out we should have flipped the attendees of each game around. The Padres' PETCO Stadium was beautiful, new, and very relaxing. It was a perfect family environment, complete with a giant sandbox for kids in right field. Dodger Stadium was the complete opposite.




This was the best part of Dodger Stadium, which is that my girls loved their Dodger Dogs. No one else could finish them, though. They were not good. The stadium was huge, impersonal, loud, smelly, and the Dodger fans could not stop doing The Wave. I hate The Wave. Plus, traffic and parking were atrocious. We spent a solid hour absolutely parked on the freeway waiting to get to the game, during which time Madeleine barfed in her coloring book. Of course, we hadn't brought a change of clothes, so she smelt like throw-up all night long. Thank goodness it was in a rental car, and not our own.

The better part of our trip were our family outings to the San Diego Zoo, the beach, and Knott's Berry Farm.



This was the best picture we could get of the pandas. There were two of them, and while one was sleeping in an unphotographable location, the other one was posing perfectly and chewing bamboo . . . right until we got up close enough to photo it. Then it decided to wander off and turn its back on everyone. Oh well. At least we got to see a real live panda, even if it was its backside.





The zoo was a lot of fun for the girls, and it was pretty low key, and not too busy. The next day we went to the beach, and had a blast. And, I was dumb enough to wander around without a shirt on, and paid the price with a mean sunburn when we got home. The girls enjoyed the ocean IF I held them while we went in. Madeleine developed an unnatural terror of seaweed, and had to be kept away from it at all times. The highlight, though was building a "splash pool" for Tori. She has been obsessed all summer with swimming and pools. Anything more than an inch of water qualifies as a "splash pool." So, everyone pitched in on the beach to dig her a pool in the wet sand, which then filled in with seawater.



Well, with all that lovely, muddy, wet sand around, we couldn't resist a mud fight. It resulted in maybe one of my favorite pictures ever of Jenny.



Our final day we went to Knott's Berry Farm. It definitely exceeded our expectations. There was a large kids section, which wasn't terribly crowded. The girls had a blast on all of the rides.



I enjoyed myself, too, and not just on the kiddie rides pictured here. They had some really great thrill rides. I always thought Knott's was just an extra cheap alternative to DisneyLand, and although the prices were cheap ($30 for adults), the rides were top notch. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone on a budget who has been to Disney already. We've done Disney three times in our marriage already, including Disney World last October, so we were ready for something else. Knott's Berry Farm definitely delivered the goods.



We had a great time and Madeleine is already asking where we're going next!

Growing a Green Thumb

Having a house has been so much fun and so much work! We've been busy putting in our backyard, and since we like to think of ourselves as wise with our money (basically a couple of cheapskates), this means we are doing it all on our own with little help. It's a slow process with quite the learning curve, but it has been very rewarding.

Let's flashback to the beginning. We don't have any pictures of the huge weeds that made the backyard impossible to be in. But that's probably a good thing, because weeds really don't deserve to be photographed. I don't really want to remember them. At least Matt had a great time running them over with a Bobcat.

After the weeds came the many, many hours of sprinkler work...


laying topsoil over our crummy clay, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow...


and finally the hydroseed. It required so much patience and so much water and standing out with a hose getting the poor dry spots wet.

But the grass sprouted, although rather spotty.


And then you may remember this spring. Weeds!! They were back and in full force! I couldn't believe how big those things got.


Well, I'm here to let you know that our hard work and patience has paid off. We have a beautiful backyard. Now, it's not even close to perfect and we have many other projects, but we have grass and even trees. Our summer has been full of days swimming in our backyard. I love it!!



Our other pride is our garden. We have been excited to have one this year because we've never really grown anything before. So we built it in March and anxiously waited for the weather to get just right for planting. We planted peas, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, pumpkins and some flowers.





We are proud to say it that everything is growing great! We even harvested the spinach already and made delicious spinach salads. Who knew that spinach had such great flavor! And the peas, ohhh, the peas. They are so sweet and fresh. Now I can't wait for our huge tomatoes to get juicy red.


Although it's been a ton of work, it has been totally worth it to create our own backyard. It's a great sense of accomplishment. There's plenty more to do, but so far we've done okay.

In fact, next year we might have to make a bigger garden.

Flower Power

Yup, we're still getting caught up on our photo log, and I think we will be for a few more weeks' worth of posts. I thought today I'd put up some pictures of our trip to the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point back in April. If you haven't been there for the festival, it is quite a spectacle as every year they plant over a quarter of a million tulip bulbs, along with assorted other flowers. We've been a couple of times, and although we don't know the first thing about horticulture, we have fun just wandering around, pointing wildly about and saying "Ooh, pretty flowers!" But most importantly, the gardens are good for photo ops.



Well, they would be good photo ops if we could get our girls to look at the camera. That's as good of a family photo as we're gonna get for a long time, I think.



Of course, the most interesting thing for the girls weren't the flowers, but the many water fountains. This is the view we had of Tori most of the time.



Madeleine nearly climbed into a couple of the fountains.



Luckily, we kept them mostly dry. But in the end, nothing is as fun as taking your entry sticker and plastering it to your forehead.



Monkey see, monkey do, you know?

Wendy's Wedding

So, time for our first non-Costa Rica post in a couple of months. We were recently admonished for our lack of posts here, so we better step our game up. I was using my Sunday afternoons and evenings for writing my brother on his mission, but he comes home on Wednesday, so I find myself with a little more free time to keep this thing up-to-date.

Anyway, one of the things we didn't blog about was the wedding of Jenny's sister, Wendy. She got married on May 1. I was at a convention for work in San Antonio just prior to the wedding, but I was able to catch a flight back just in time, arriving about ten minutes before the ceremony. Jenny helped set up the reception, and it looked great, as did our girls and their cousin Aurelia in their beautiful new dresses.




Wendy and her husband Mike also looked great as they cut the cake and danced the night away.



Tori especially liked the dancing, and was quick to join Wendy and Mike on their first dance.



Madeleine and I soon joined her.




We had a lot of fun, and we think we might need to enroll our girls in dance classes here soon. Do all little girls love dancing, or is this some particular talent they have that needs developing?