...for the wonderful blankie you sent me! 
I love feeling all the different textures of animals! 
It must have taken forever to stitch all those lines by hand and I know that it's not like I'm your only new grandkid this year!
This blanket will alway remind me of your love for me. Thanks again!
The last weekend of June, we had some fun out-of-town visitors, Mark and Tracy and family. We only got to see them for a day, so of course we headed to the nearest beach, La Jolla Shores. Ryan, Tracy's brother, also came down from L.A. to visit too. He was such a good sport. He actually encouraged the girls to cover him in wet sand when Tracy and I were trying to get them to stop! These girls always obey their mothers though, so you can guess which voice they listened to ... not ours!
Brooklyn loved shadowing her big cousin Alyssa...
that is, when she wasn't following her dad.
After dinner, the moms needed some relief from the kids while we cleaned up dinner and made chocolate chip cookies. The dads so willingly and graciously accepted the suggestion, the first time it was mentioned (wink, wink!), to take the kids for a wagon ride down the trail behind our house. Thanks for the nice set of wheels, Papa Mac! This wonder of a wagon can comfortably fit a whole band of Badgers! Although, they really seem more like rug rats sometimes! If you only knew what was hiding behind those innocent smiles! Ha!
She may not write a "2" without the help of dots and lines, but when no rules apply, Brooklyn will create things like this. Can you guess what it is???
for a Sunday morning bath...
Tonight Stephen watched the kids at home while I attended a session at the temple. Basically while I was gone Brooklyn whooped up on him in a couple rounds of the princess memory game. There were only 10 cards used in the two rounds that they played. For the first game, Stephen got only one turn, and Brooklyn got all the matches. She first flipped over two non-matching cards, he then flipped over 2 other non-matching cards. For her next turn, she flipped over a Sleeping Beauty card, and matched it with the bent card, which she remembered was also Sleeping Beauty. Then she just flipped over every other card that had not yet been turned and remembered the where its match was. Crazy! Because Stephen is so competitive, he of course had to call for a rematch. This round there were 12 cards. Stephen got two turns and the players both got 3 matches or 6 cards a piece. Tie.
We can do it, we can do it
Later she decided to branch out and use some scrap fabric as a headband for Ian. 
