Planting Flowers, and a Fearsome Tiger

I taught Fina how to play with the puppy this morning. It seemed odd to me that you'd have to teach a kid how to play with a dog, but I guess that Mocha hasn't really played with toys since Fi was born. I had him running all around the room and both of the girls were laughing and laughing.

Eloise got a nice trim on her bangs so she no longer has the really long piece that hangs down into one eye.

Then we went out to breakfast and she charmed everyone in the restaurant with her mad cuteness skillz. While we were "in town" we bought some new plants for the garden. We were looking at vegetables but Fi fell in love with a big ol' flower and my mom let her get it. The "isn't this the most beautiful flower you've ever seen?" speech won her over, because the flower was rather beautiful.

When we got home, my mom and Eloise went to take a nap, and the rest of us went outside to plant our new plants. Murphy thought he'd dig a nice big hole, but my dad told him that's ok, I have a shovel and I'd appreciate it if you didn't dig up my yard.

Fina transplanted her big ol' flower into a big ol' pot so that when it warms up it can come out of the greenhouse and brighten up the deck.

She was in charge of putting dirt around it, and grandpa helped her a little too. Somehow in the course of adding the dirt, they managed to knock the blossom off the plant.

Fina thought it would look just stunning on Mocha, however Mocha didn't agree.

I love the longsuffering look in this picture. It's like "why must you humiliate me, my girl?" Or maybe "you like the flower so much, you can put it on your own head!"

Which Fina also found pretty hilarious.

I happened to look outside and noticed my cat sitting in the field and I thought she looked pretty cool so I grabbed my camera.

After I snapped the first picture, she took a leap,

Then started walking towards me. Apparently she wanted to make sure I got a good one.

Fierce.

Pizza Pockets

There is a series of photos that my sister took one day of Fina about the age Eloise is now, helping make hamburger pockets for dinner at my parents' house. It manages to make the food look super revolting, so when my mom suggested we all work together to make pizza pockets, I totally wasn't going to pick up my camera. I resisted the urge for quite some time, and finally it was just too cute so I got my camera. And suddenly Fina is totally bored...

(I think she's just waiting for my dad to give her a new piece of dough to roll out, but she was also horribly backlit.)

Then "for some reason" my mom said Eloise was not going to get to roll any more dough out. (I believe she also licked the rolling pin before she started rolling her hair.)

But we were still working hard and having fun doing it together, and after I put my camera down and went back to helping, Eloise got interested again and got to help make more, but with someone else rolling out the dough.

Poor Mocha chose a bad place to sleep during all this baking so she got a nice sprinkling of flour.

And here's Fina doing her job of taking the puppy out after he woke up. She takes this job very seriously.

Eloise's New Bike

It works great!

What? That's not Eloise? Her legs are about an inch and a half too short to ride it. So I put the seat up and let Fi have at it, because maybe she'll learn to balance and then I can take the training wheels off her bike. I say 2 weeks of practicing on Eloise's and she'll be riding hers no problem.

And Eloise will keep trying to figure out a way to keep up. (Fina was a little pissed when I put the handle bars down on her little scooter so El could use it. Turnabout is fair play I say!)

Watch out! Coming through!

Close-ups

After I picked Fina up from school today we had a little rainstorm. There were a couple little girls who were gleefully too silly to come in out of the rain.

The theme this week of the photo challenge I've been doing was close-ups. And Fi has the most wonderful freckles, so I called her over to me so that I could try to take a picture. My camera was on the wrong setting and I couldn't get it to focus, plus she was being kind of a beast about it so I finally let her go back out into the rain. So Eloise walked over just as I got my camera figured out and stole the show:

She has her mouth open because that's what Fina was doing to be a brat to me.

Eventually I got Fina to come back for another try, but she was still being kind of a beast about it. I got this one that shows her little freckles, but I don't really think it even looks like her.

Then she was being onery and holding her hands up in front of her face, but I outsmarted her because I thought it was kind of cool to take close-ups of her little fingers.

Ummy Nummy Slop

I cooked up some slop for dinner. It was super easy. Brown half a pound of italian sausage, add a can of white beans (drained) and a can of diced tomatoes and cook until no longer soupy. Serve over mashed potatoes.

It looks fairly revolting, but it tasted pretty good. My children scarfed it down. Fina got up in the middle of dinner to give me a hug and thank me for cooking such a delicious meal.

Eloise approves heartily. I guess I'll be cooking this slop again.

Girls outside

Squeak had a cookie, she was using these new found powers for evil good.

The cookie cowboy is out riding the ranges.

She picked up a hitchhiker (and subsequently broke the horse) >:(

Grandpa keeps the dog occupied by tossing the ball over his shoulder while entertaining the girls on the swings.

I love action shots. 

Dogs and stuff

Hung out with my mom's dogs today.

Mocha is waiting for someone to put down the camera and throw the ball ;)

Murph was being onery with the girls' water toys. It was too cold to swim so I'm not sure why they even had water toys in the pool, except that they were having fun with them.

He's hilarious because he tries to dig in the water.

This is about how he was most of the day, crazy wild dog. He got sent to bed early for racing around like a fool and stealing anything he could get his mouth on. Computer mouse, baby's blankie, pop cans, pieces of paper, and the final straw was when he jumped up and started ripping a house plant apart.

And my dad fired up his new barbecue (the charcoal side even, the other side is propane) and cooked us some delicious cheeseburgers for dinner. They weren't even burnt raw!