Mocha

Mocha was being particularly cooperative for photographs this afternoon. I took a lot of great pictures of her, so I narrowed it down by choosing different facial expressions.

The "I'm going to eat you up" face

The "You looking at my ball?" face

The playful pose

Roo Rooing

And my personal favorite, the one ear up pose.

Trip

We went on kind of a stupid mini-vacation this weekend. It was nice though because we relaxed and got to spend a lot of time as a family. We went to Great Falls because John had to work the smith's visit, but then for some reason he thought it would be more fun to spend the day in the car and drive across to Missoula and spend 2 days there. So that's what we did. We got the coolest motel room (and super cheap because they want to fill them in the off season so they have deals on them if you stay 2 nights.) It was called a "kid's suite" so it had the regular motel room stuff, but then where a regular suite would have the couch, it had a little cove blocked off with bunk beds. The bunk bed room had it's own little tv with an xbox and you could check out games from the front desk. We got monopoly because John is kind of lame we thought Fina would be able to play it with us, and we had a great time playing together "on the tv" one night. John lost.

Fina loved having her own television. It was super nice too because when we wanted to relax in the motel room she'd climb up on the bed and watch it and play with her animals. The other favorite part was the pool, and both girls were constantly bringing me their swimming suits and/or asking if we could go swimming again.

Fina picked out "turtle" at target, best 2.99 I ever spent. She was confident enough that she was just trolling around the pool instead of clinging for dear life

Eloise is a little fish. Once she got used to swimming, she would try to swim away from me.

Before we came home today we went to the carousel and adjacent playground. We let the girls play on the playground for quite a while to run out their energy before we took them in and showed them the carousel.

Eloise

The cool playground. I like how it looks kind of ominous with the gray clouds overhead.

Fina loved the slide.

Eloise thought this rope net ladder thing was great, even if she didn't really know what the point of it was.

Eloise started climbing the stairs and I asked Fi to run and grab her and get her to come back down, but instead Fi decided to be a brat and ignore me, and lead that baby up to the very top and bring her down the twisty tunnel slide. Eloise screamed the whole way down and then tried to run away and climb up again.

Here's Fina before her first carousel ride. See how you can tell she's been crying? It took much convincing to even get her to ride the horse that doesn't move up and down. She wanted to sit in the stupid chariot with Eloise and me.

And here's Fi before her second ride. I love the difference in her body language.

John and Eloise on their chariot. Eloise cried when we had to leave the carousel. She could have ridden all day.

Girls

It was too quiet in the living room so I went back to the bedroom to investigate. They're not really supposed to sit on the doll chairs, but it was so cute I had to snap a picture before I went and found them other things to sit on.

Being silly at lunch, but I like how the quesadilla frames her eyes.

Close-up of the squeak. It's kind of a gross picture, but the lighting on her face was so perfect.

Here's what Eloise does when I try to make her do anything she doesn't really want to do. Lays down on the floor and grins at me. I was trying to fix her hair because the rubber band had (mysteriously) fallen out but her hair was sticking straight up because of the ponytail.

Fina taking her job as dog sitter seriously. She's not pushing on the dog's back, the dog just decided to stretch the second I took the picture.

Eloise

Good use for the doll table.

Animals

I took care of the dog overnight while my parents were out of town. You could say that I took care of the cat too, but she's pretty self sufficient. I did pet her when she came around, but mostly I just stayed out of her way. When I left, Mocha tried to get into my car and come with us. When I told her no, she wasn't coming, she got really excited and ran back into the house to wait for her people to return.

Let me in!

Looking ridiculous

Looking pretty

Having a bath

Playing outside

"Certainly not" begging for food