The first stop of our trip was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. We met our friends Becky and Sharick for an evening of fun and dinner. We rode the gondola to the top of the mountain for the views of the valley. We haven’t seen Becky and Sharick since our last trip out to Colorado, so we were able to introduce them to the girls.

At the top of the mountain, they had several activities setup as a tourist trap and most were not friendly for our little ones, so we skipped them. Lucky for Emily, they didn’t charge extra for the activity of playing in the gravel. She had quite a collection of little stones and would have filled her pockets if she could have.

We talked the guys into riding a rollercoaster that took you down part of the mountain. The novelty of it was that you had control of your speed by the use of a break. They seemed to enjoy it a lot and were glad that they had gone.

We are just home from our marathon family vacation out West. We did lots of great things and had great moments. One of these moments had to do with rainbows. Emily has been a fan of rainbows for a while – she loves the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ and has two rainbow nightgowns. While on our trip she found out that she can find rainbows in the sky. We found a double rainbow that reflected to the ground on both sides as we drove in Utah and another one in the Grand Canyon during a rainstorm. Both of these rainbows caused a lot of discussion about them. She announced to every person along the Grand Canyon rim that there was a rainbow.

There seems to be a lasting effect of this discovery. One is that she found a faint rainbow as we drove home. Another is that she also has started arranging colored things. The alphabet letters on the fridge were arranged in like colors and then arched in a rainbow shape. She also arranged her crayons in similar colors and all lined up. She put the yellow together next to the orange and so on. It is so much fun to see Emily grasp concepts and then apply them in her play.

Classic kid stuff! One of Emily’s classic phrases we are hearing now days – “I do it, myself”. It is really cute and a good description of her current state of mind. The longer I hear it, the more she means it. Today, she literally ran me out of the bathroom, so that, she could potty and ‘do it, myself’. In the end, she did do it herself. I guess this is just the first step of my letting her go.

After church on Sunday, we and the grandparents caught a yummy lunch and then spend some time by a fountain for Emily to play in. The day was a little cooler than our normal hot August days and made for a beautiful day to be out in. Emily, like usual, was a little skittish about getting wet. She enjoyed playing ‘Hokey Pokey’ and sticking hands and feet in the water with her Mommy. The game she loved most was getting her feet wet and then running out to visit with a grandparent and then returning to the water.

A cousin of mine sent some dress-up clothes for the girls. We got them out and played with them en masse one day. Emily was in heaven! Julia seemed to really enjoy herself, too. Emily’s favorite costume was a Cinderella dress, “glass” slippers, jewels and purse. To that she enjoyed adding cheerleading pompoms and a Blues Clues hat. Julia spent most of the time in a little pink tutu chewing on purse handles or pompom madness.

We finally talked Emily into trying other costumes on like a Snow White and Sleeping Beauty dress. But in the end she was most interested in the oversized blue Cinderella dress. She wore it to dinner after we talked her into leaving the shoes off. The shoes had become a slipping hazzard. For bedtime, we were able to revert back to a nightgown.

For Halloween, Julia is going to be a lion and with the addition of these dress-up clothes she is going to be a tutu wearing lion. I think it will be adorable. The jury is still out on Emily for Halloween. I was thinking originally about a pirate, but maybe it will be Cinderella.

Emily discovered that she liked to play with a cold pack. This is somewhat problematic because it warms up pretty quickly, takes a while to re-cool, and we only have one. In a moment of inspiration I discovered some frozen colored ice treats in the freezer.

We didn’t open them, but each girl got a colored frozen stick to play with and chew on. I’m going to keep them handy for days filled with teething pain. The girls seemed to really enjoy playing the same game together and swapped them at one point.