Random Photo Tuesday (on Wednesday)

Here are my beautiful little darlings along with Beth's little darling, Emily, and they are coated from head to toe in Hidden Valley Lake dirt. Red dirt. We were visiting my mom's house and they went outside under the guise of searching for Lake County diamonds... but instead, apparently they were turning themselves and each other into mud pies.

You wanna know the most shocking part about this? My mom didn't even blink an eye when she saw the girls looking like this. MY mother who, when I was little and we went to visit my grandparents in Auburn, would spend half of our trip warning us about the dangers of RED DIRT. You know the kind that will never come out of anything. It will stain your clothes and mess up your brand new white tennis shoes and ruin your carpet and destroy your entire life if you're not careful. My mother stressed out a LOT about red dirt in those days. If you came in from playing in the yard with so much as a trace of red dirt on you then LOOK OUT.

I'm pretty sure I started shaking a little when I saw my children covered in the stuff with my mother standing behind me. I braced myself for lightening to strike. But all she did was laugh. She said, "You better take pictures." Umm. Okay. Who are you and what did you do with my mother?

This is Alyssa with Boo. Alyssa can't sleep without Boo. Or won't sleep without Boo. This is one of several Boos that we have. For a while we numbered them. There was original Boo. Then Boo 2. I think the one above is Boo 3 but I can't be sure. Now they're all just Boos and she'll sleep with any or all of them, lucky for me.


Here's one of Amanda with her best friend in the whole wide world, Rilie. She used to live next door, then sadly moved away, then moved nearby again... but now... far away again. Wah! We still get to have sleepovers now and then though.

Last weekend we went to my adorable niece, Tia's, 14th birthday party.

Here are the girls with my super cute niece, Katie.

And here's my handsome nephew, Giovanni, with some Swedish Fish. Long ago when Gio was new to the family, my sister and nieces were trying to Nelson-ify him and among other things, they gave him some Swedish fish. He sat in the backseat happily eating them for about 20 minutes when he finally said, "Wait a second! This candy is NASTY!"


Here's my mom at the bottom of the best slide ever. At the Chevron Rod & Gun club in Richmond. Stepping onto that playground was like stepping back into my childhood. I LOVED that slide as a kid. Thought I was pretty brave going down it again until my nearly 80-yr-old mother went down it a while later. She's posing at the bottom for this picture because we had Giovanni catch her at the bottom. As my sister Darin says, "It's all fun and games until someone breaks a hip!" I nearly landed on my butt when I went down but managed to catch myself in the least graceful way possible. (Thanks for not posting that video on Facebook, Katie! She posted an awesome one of my mom going down.) See below for Kate's photo of Alyssa in mid-air... about to fall on her butt. Only to get right back up and climb the stairs again. Because it is the funnest slide in the whole wide world. (And no, I don't care if "funnest" isn't a real word.)



And here are the the girls on the teeter-totter at Rod and Gun. Alyssa is obviously practicing to be an old lady who yells at small children for walking on her lawn.

A few pics of Alyssa playing on the monkey bars. She began perfecting her technique last spring when we would walk over to the school and wait to pick up Amanda. Now she's going for the record in speed.

Clearly, doing the monkey bars is EXHAUSTING!

Grandma-Daddy's-Mom got this outfit for Amanda. How cute is she? She never would have worn this for me. Yesterday she asked if she could try on the outfit she's going to wear when she goes to tea with Aunt Darin. She came out wearing this.




And then she posed.



And posed.



And posed some more.

And then it was Alyssa's turn to pose.





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