Happy Birthday, Rylie and Ellie

Rylie loves the beach -

and didn't even care that it was freezing cold!!!

Our sweet little "girl in the middle" turned 7!

This is the view we had of her most of the day!!!  So cute!

Ellie turns 12 on Sunday!  We celebrated (sorta) her Birthday at the beach, too.  She was able to bring a friend so Jolene joined us on our misadventure to the freezing cold beach!

(Justin and Cali were there too!)

Funny:  Ellie can be a little "blonde" sometimes and we love it - makes us giggle!

I was staring at this nearby manufacturing plant and wondered out loud what they do at that plant.

Ellie looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Mom, thats not a plant.  Its a cone, with a shirt on it!  Duh!"

We were like, "What?"  "Mom, thats not a plant, its a cone!"  She thought we were talking about this:

It took us 3 tries to explain it to her so she understood what I was talking about.  I still can't figure how she thought I had mistaken a cone for a plant (as in green, leafy thing!)  Cracks us up!

So, the beach was a total BUST!  We brought tons of food to bar-b-que but couldn't get a fire-pit to do so.  And it was really cloudy and freezing cold (I wore a jacket the entire time).  Then it got so crazy-busy we were having a hard time keeping our eyes on the kids. 

Change of plans!

Instead of Grandpa and Grandma, David, Julie, Noah, and the Mike VanVleet family joining us at the beach, we joined them all at Grandma's for dinner and swimming.  It was plenty warm (at least til the sun went down) to swim there and we ended up having a pretty fun birthday party!

Rylie and Anna played a rousing game of Go Fish!

P.S. It was a fun day, but dumb Mom messed up and didn't get sunscreen on fast enough and/or often enough because my poor Ellie and Justin were SOOOOO burned!  I still feel terrible.  They were so sick from the burns they couldn't even go to church the next day.  They just layed there - unable to move or even get dressed -  hurting and complaining.  I will become a sunscreen fanatic from now on! Please forgive me, my sweet children!!!