New Pool!

Well it may be the end of summer, but that also means end of summer sales! So, we got a new backyard pool since our old one had a small hole and always deflated after a few hours. These two were very excited when it arrived!

It took quite a while to blow it up though (thanks Daddy), so we passed the time by playing in the water table...

And setting up a car wash...

And then it was finally ready and the kids could not get in fast enough!

They love it - Ben kept saying thank you over and over again and finally said, "Hey Dad, triple thank you!!"

He can swim across the pool and practice his strokes.

Even Juliette liked it (I was unsure if it would be too big for her, but she did just fine).

Abbey swimming across the pool.

It is a huge improvement over our last pool, which was about the size of the 3 kids sitting together in a close circle. So compared to that, this one has a ton of room! Another exciting new item in our house is a telescope given to us by Nick! The kids were excited to test it out, but it doesn't get dark until very late. So we set it up after they went to sleep and tried to wake them up to come see the moon. Ben barely woke up and said he didn't want to. Abbey wanted to, but once she got out there, she wouldn't look in the telescope and eagerly went back to bed. The next morning, Ben was very upset that we hadn't woken him up (he apparently did not remember us waking him and refused to believe that we tried). So we promised him that we would do it again the next night. Apparently, he did not trust us though because he would not go to sleep. He came down from bed about every 15 minutes until it was time. Unfortunately, the moon wasn't high enough in the sky until almost 10:00, so it made for a very late night for him! But when we finally told him it was time, he ran down with his astronaut helmet and flashlight and was so excited! He was very impressed and kept saying, "this is so great!" Then he told me that he wanted to look for the flag that the Americans first put on the moon. It was really cute