Long time coming update

I haven't put any pics up in a while, but it's not because we haven't been doing anything. Quite the opposite in fact - I feel like I can't find much time to post these days.

Chalk is a favorite around here in the spring/summer. Taisim loves to draw, and she started drawing flowers, suns and faces. Here's one of the first tries - these are all attempts at heads. She got very frustrated if they didn't come out as she wanted them to, and would try again. I don't know that we got a picture of the one or two that were the finished product.

Below that is a nice surprise I got when I finished work one afternoon - this is the first picture of a person she drew, and it was me! She asked me to add the glasses, but everything else was done by her, on a magnadoodle no less.

Taipan likes for us to draw, while he describes what it is he'd like to see. This is a battlefield from the game Worms, which we downloaded onto our xbox. We played it *a lot* for about a week, but it went by the wayside once Wolverine came into the house.

Our espresso maker was finally shipped back to use about two weeks ago. It came in a box, which was packed in a box, which was packed in a box with styrofoam peanuts. After I got over being anal about keeping the peanuts in the box, Taisim had a great time playing with them. Most of her play was pretending she was a polar bear, in an igloo, and the piece of styrofoam in her mouth here is a fish:

Taisim with "princess hair", playing with a couple of friends that came over, but were too quick-moving for me to get a decent picture of:

Playing with pattern blocks. The ones Taipan has were brought back by my in-laws from a trip to Taiwan. Simi's playing with ones we got about a year ago.

Finally, our new slip-n-slide. I got this on a day when the high was in the low 60s, and the following day it wasn't much warmer, but Taipan & Taisim have a higher tolerance for cold water in mild temperatures than I do. The water pressure here isn't so great, so it works best if someone is standing with their feet on the bumper at the end, so that the water sprays higher from the tube on the side.

I've got more pics in the camera, so maybe I'll get those here soon.