It was a beautiful summer day today—hot and perfect for the pool. We spent a lot of time in there playing all sorts of games.

We all had a ball making shrinky dinks today. We even found a way to do some of them on the computer, so we could make them out of photographs. Of course the kids all wanted pictures of Abby…

The kids wanted to see the Renaissance Festival, and the weather was finally good this weekend, so we decided to go. Of course they were amazed when Daddy threw the knives and all three stuck in the shield, but the highlight of their day was the jousting. The castle has improved quite a bit since the last time we went (maybe 8 years ago) when it was all but falling apart.

Ah, summer weather is here, and we all know that means time for evening fires! We had a really good one by the pool tonight and made s’mores (“but I haven’t had any yet…”).

There was a little cheapoff carnival in the parking lot of the mall and the kids really wanted to go to it. We didn’t stay all that long, because it started to rain a little on us, but we had fun while we were there.

After only four assembly tries, the neighbors next door got their trampoline up and invited the kids over to play on it. Needless to say, they had a blast on it:

The kids all wanted to eat cake before they opened presents, which says a lot about either the cake or what they were expecting in presents. Jake was the one who remembered that Lauren had gotten a small present on the twins’ birthday, and so “to be fair” he and Beth should get presents on Lauren’s.

Beth got a “Glo-E” panda. The pictures of her jumping up and down in excitement were too blurry to use:

Jake did a great job acting surprised, even though he helped pick out all the presents, including his own:

I’m going to be working on the weekend before her actual birthday, so she talked me into celebrating this weekend. Everyone loved the cake we had at Jake and Beth’s birthday that Lauren insisted we had to get the exact same one for her. Here are some cake pictures:

Lauren decided to teach Jake how to make lemonade, which was really cute.

The lighting almost makes the girls’ hair look blue. Oh, wait a minute, it was blue.

Here are some pictures from the San Diego Zoo for you — I wish you could have been here with me. I’ll put more up later.