The Summer of Love

Wow - what a great day we had today! It was a beautiful, sunny but not too hot day. Perfect for being outside, which is what Kael did all day.

This morning Truong and Kael went to Corona del Mar with Dennis and Josh (I stayed home with Malia so she could nap). The boys dug trenches in the sand, made a mini-Molokini island and ran around in the surf. Sometime over lunch it was mentioned that Kael got a brand new tent (it's set-up in our room) and Kael invited Josh over to sleep in it (Kael's slept and napped in it since it was purchased Saturday morning). Of course Josh promptly said "OK!" so I received a phone call from Truong informing me that although he left with one kid, he's coming home with two. Shana thinks this is weird, having a tent set up in the house but it's just another typical day in the Mai household.

Erin (Josh's mom) invited us over for a slip-n-slide and pizza party since we took her kid for the afternoon (a fair trade I would say: her napping kid for food and entertainment). Since we needed to take a picture of the three boys (Kael, Josh and Ryan) for their pre-school teacher's end-of-year gift anyway, it was then decided that the Mai's AND the DiDodo's would head over to the Bickmeier's for pictures, slip-n-slide and pizza.

See how a simple task can suddenly take on a life of its own?

Don't ask me why, but I thought it would be really cute to dress all the kids in tie-dye and call it our Summer of Love picture. I'm not sure what's scarier: that I wanted to dress everyone in tie-dye OR that I had enough tie-dye to dress up FIVE kids??

I took about 25 pictures and 1.5 pictures turned out decent. All the kids were pretty good. They had weird grimaces that sort of passed as smiles, but at least most of them stayed put. The only kid who kept walking off was Malia. There's one picture where she's not even in it - I think I caught part of her head as she walked away.

From there we all headed to the backyard and the kids had a blast. I didn't change Malia into her swim suit as I didn't think she'd get wet. Boy, was I wrong. She was completely soaked. She got knocked around by the boys on the slip-n-slide but she got back up and kept on trucking. She's a tough little peanut. And she kept going back for more. Even when we were all done playing in the water and started eating. I kept having to change her clothes because she kept walking back to the grass and playing in the puddles. I ran out of clothes (she went through 3 outfits) and started borrowing Kaitlyn's clothes. Finally we had to fold up the slip-n-slide so she wouldn't wander back into it.

All in all it was a great time. Thank you Bickmeier's for having us over and thank you DiDodo's for bringing the pizza. Pictures are posted in I spy...