A big birthday!

I had my 30th birthday this week!   Perhaps it was good for me and my family that I am very pregnant, so my expectations were kept in check.   We had granola and yogurt and fruit salad for breakfast, went swimming, and had a great coconut cake with chocolate frosting and marshmallows (the kids really wanted to decorate it with marshmallows).   Since my mother-in-law was in town, Manburger took me out to dinner and we had some great shrimp ceviche and a lobster roll.  We also went to Babies-r-Us after dinner to sift through the maze of selecting a new carseat for this little girl who will be here soon.  Apparently carseats have an expiration date and our old one is just past that date.   It was a lovely day and I am so grateful for the amazing parents who brought me into this world and for my loving sisters and my excellent husband and sweet children.  I am truly blessed!

35 weeks

One more pregnancy photo for y'all.   I can't believe I'm already 35 weeks along.  With any luck, only one more month to wait for this little girl to arrive.  Hooray!

Fourth of July Parade and more

 We went to the Lake Highlands' 4th of July Parade. It was a very nice small town parade. We got there early enough to find a shady spot to put up a folding chair, but we did have to walk a couple blocks from where we parked our car. 

 Clark enjoying one of the suckers he got from parade candy throwers. 

 The parade started out with a boy scout color guard and then a color guard in old revolutionary style attire. There were thirteen state flags carried behind them in what looked like the order that the states ratified the constitution. I thought that was a nice touch.

Here is a picture of the kids picking up candy thrown out to them. There were some bigger boys who were pretty aggressive about snatching up as much candy as they could. I didn't mind; that just meant my kids only got a little bit of candy, which was plenty. Sabrina was very good about making sure Clark was getting as much candy as she was. Sometimes she wasn't paying attention to new candy being thrown as she looked in Clark's bag to make sure he was getting enough. 

We saw a guy riding on a three wheel unicycle. Is that still a unicycle? I mean he only has one wheel on the ground, right? Talk about good balance. 

We saw this float with a gentleman playing a vintage 1920s calliope. The sign on the float said that it was his privately-owned instrument. It sounded very festive. 

The picture on the left is Yogurl at 32 weeks pregnant. She is a week past that now, but she wasn't ready to have her picture taken this morning, so I used last week's. The picture on the right is Clark all wrapped up with tape. No, Sabrina did not do this. It was his mother. She wrapped him up and then went to get the camera. While she was gone he fell over and just lay there on his tummy calling "Mamma!" I went and picked him up while Sabrina laughed. I told Sabrina not to laugh at him, but then Yogurl came back with the camera and laughed at him. Okay, I laughed at him, too.

My garden is producing a lot of good fruit this year. This shows two kinds of cherry tomatoes (we have had a lot of those), as well as big boy, lemon boy, and cherokee purple tomatoes. There is also a little lunchbox orange pepper there. We have had a really good tomato crop, a few peppers, maybe 8 or 9 cucumbers, and a long island cheese squash. So glad things went better this year. Unfortunately squash bugs have killed the squash plant, the cucumber plants, the cantaloupe plant and are now destroying the watermelon plant. Oh well, you can't win them all with gardening. I will let you know how the ginger, onion and garlic turn out.