4th of July and more...

We had a nice 4th of July. The Eagney family, the Pool family, and Bobbie & Dick came over for dinner. The kids had a blast playing together all afternoon. Most of the adults enjoyed some afternoon mudslides. Yummy! We were all ready for a nap before going to the fireworks!

Sydney enjoyed exploring the house. She is such a good baby!
My masterpiece! Okay, I've never made an ice cream cake before so I thought I would give it a shot. It was purely an effort of well I could try this or that. The outcome was quite delicious, although unprofessional at best!
There was the thematic red, white, and blue layers and then the brownie layer thrown in the middle! I realized when I started putting it together that I needed a third layer of cake but didn't have any cake mix. Melissa had a box of brownie mix so that is what ended up in there!

Sophie enjoyed it so much that she announced she was going to marry her cake while she was eating it! I was just happy to make Sophie so happy! (Not that hard to impress her in the dessert world though, but I take what I can get.)

The kids spent most of the afternoon playing in Abby's crate. When I say Abby's crate is huge, I mean it. All SEVEN kids were comfortably playing in there.

Vanna, uh I mean Paige, models "Club Krate."
Last night we all went to the dog beach. It is always so much fun to go there. The kids love it, the dogs love it, and I survive it! Abby is quite the puller at the beach. On normal walks she is fine, but there is something about the dog beach that brings the puller out in her. She did go out and swim with me so that was fun. She was so cute and kept her head against me as we swam! Hanzie loves the dog beach too because it is so breezy and whenever he gets hot he can easily cool off in the water.

Unfortunately, the salt system on our pool broke. We didn't realize at first and kept adding more and more salt. Well, now the salt level in our pool is crazy high. The new salt cell is coming tomorrow so we have to get the salt level back to normal before we can hook it all up. The only way to do that is to empty the pool halfway and fill it up. While my stomach churns at the cost of refilling the pool, the kids have enjoyed the experience. The water is emptied out through the hose so the kids sprayed each other for hours with the warm pool water. Once the pool got lower they decided that they would go in it and play with the lower water levels and enjoyed that just as much!