The Lizard

Lizzie is growing so fast. Her nickname has been evolving from hiccups (which she rarely has anymore) to Lizard. Billy is mainly to blame chuckle. She is into yoga, mainly the downward dog position. She does it much better than I have ever been able to do it.


Mandi shot this picture of her. She looks eager to finally achieve her lifelong goal of gnawing on the camera.












Lizzie taking a breather at Emma's Bday party.













She has her first tooth! Of course she has to do things her own way so instead of growing the center two in the bottom or the top, she is growing one tooth on top one over from the center?!
She is supremely camera shy for some reason, every time we have tried to get a picture of this tooth she clamps her mouth shut... it is so funny. Billy ended up having to force the issue as I did want this pic before her other teeth break through.

Emma's Birthday!

Emma is SEVEN!! I am in denial (as I usually am every time my kids get a bit older.)
She wanted a horse party at our pool (go figure.) We decided to re-name a few games to make them horse friendly. We played horse horse pony (duck duck goose), stomp the fly (kids tie a balloon around each ankle and then try to stomp everyone else's "flies" without getting their own popped,) and mustang river round up (freeze tag, only with a wrangler, a corral and having to swim under captured mustangs to free them.) We also had a pinata and of course a cake. Our camera battery died near the end so we have no pics of Emma blowing out her candles or opening presents. Oh well.








Being silly










Getting ready for the pinata. It wasn't til later that I realized both boys escaped this picture.
Emma playing with Lizzie in her luxury yacht


The cake. I am really glad I decided to take a picture of it before bringing it to the pool.... our camera battery died during the pinata fun. I am not a very good artist so the horse was a bit of a challenge but I think most people did recognize it as being one snicker.
Overall it was a fun but busy weekend with the last day of school, Emma's birthday and Father's day all in the same weekend.

School is out!!

I am always so happy when school gets out and I get time with my girls. Here in Fairfax County they start the day after labor day and finish mid-June which feels late to me. The kids don't have their minds on school after Memorial day when the pool opens. Last year they didn't get out until June 22 which was horrid. This year since we didn't use any snow days they were able to move it up to June 13 which was much better. Emma thought it was a great birthday present :) Now we will be spending our days at the pool, we practically live there in the summer time. We go in the morning, sometimes we stay through lunch and then we go back again after Billy is home from work for an evening swim. It will be challenging this year keeping an eye on 3 swimmers and a bobber. Sam and Emma are very good swimmers now. Mandi is getting there quickly but I still need to keep a close eye on her as her feet don't quite touch the bottom yet.

Here are some end of the school year pics:
Samantha's strings concert. My word the place was packed. They said this was the largest group of 4th graders to take on strings that this school has ever had. She has really enjoyed playing the violin this year. I am hoping she will keep at it for next year.
Samantha's invention! Samantha had to invent a machine for her final science project. She teamed up with her friend and they built this handy dandy pet feeder!
Emma with her lovely teacher, Ms. May. She was such a perfect fit for Emma and she provided Emma with advanced work so she wouldn't be bored in class, I sure wish Emma could have her for 2nd grade as well! Ms. May is just a lovely person, we will miss her and I really hope she is around when Mandi hits 1st grade. Sam's teacher was..well.. lets just say they had a wee personality conflict. She is a nice lady but I don't feel she as a teacher was able to serve some of Samantha's needs as a GT student. Two days before school was out, watching Sam struggle to finish a bunch of math homework using concepts they had just learned that day I think I finally conceded that the nickname people have been using may not be too far off the mark.... Miller, the killer (tee hee.)
I usually let the girls keep a few of their favorite pieces of work from the year and then throw the rest out. We take pictures of some if they are hard to part with. Lizzie had great fun with Emma's "discard" pile! She sure made a mess. Looking at it, and considering how many students there are in the area, I think its amazing we actually have any trees around here, good grief.

Memorial Day Camping!

We have made it a yearly tradition to go camping over Memorial Day weekend. We went with 3 other families: the Hliboks, the Bricks and the Torsiellos. We had a blast! We sure missed the Snow family who we started this tradition with. I am not as good with the camera now that I am busy with Lizzie, so the pics are a bit short of spectacular but at least we took some. We camped at Shenandoah in the Matthews Arm campground. In the past we always camped at Big Meadows and we really love it there. Matthews Arm was ok but I much prefer Big Meadows. There were lot of bears in the Matthews Arm area. Everywhere we hiked we saw bear scat but we never actually saw any bears. Rats! One hike, everyone we passed was like.. "Oh there are bears right up that way." We never saw them. I supposed with Mandi singing at the top of her lungs all along the way it would be silly to think we would catch glimpse of any wildlife snicker. But hey, I guess I should consider myself at fault. I told the girls when hiking in bear country, we should make some noise as we hike to alert bears we are coming as they don't like being caught off guard. Mandi took it to heart and made sure she scared off every bear in a 3 mile radius, bless her.

We have never had much of an issue with ticks, but this time around I caught one climbing in Emma's hair as we hiked and we found two sucking away on Mandi ick. Billy found an awesome little gizmo called the tick twister at the pet store a couple months back. Max had been getting quite a few during the spring. These things work like a charm! They are so much easier to use than trying to use tweezers and ending up with squished ticks and buried mouthparts.

We are outgrowing our van! We are gonna have to get a rack of some sort put on top cuz we were really squished in there for this trip! Mandi has the leaning tower of pillows next to her... when we hit the twists and turns along Skyline drive the poor girl got buried.
(Notice the cute Lizzie feet)


Billy has a tradition of building a swing for the kids when we go camping. He bought new rope this time around and they had a great time. Sadly it was short lived. The kids tore the swing down before I had a chance to try it out. Emma had a good time on it!Lizzie has decided she is a true Kendrick and loves camping just as much as the rest of us!
(Wait til she sinks her future teeth into her first s'mores!) I think we got this baby seat from Billy's sister. It's pretty ancient but is fabulous for camping! I haven't seen any out there in the stores so really glad we have this one.

Lizzie does circus tricks even in the wild! Hey even bears like being entertained.
This was a 4 mile round trip hike to Overall Run falls. The kids did great on the hike, it was pretty challenging for little legs and for my flabby out of shape big legs.


Sam and Emma cool off in the nice coooolllddd (says Emma) water. They saw crayfish to boot!

The boys enjoy an afternoon nap. Our tent is pretty enormous.. I love it. You can see the dog den in the center which is so very nice to have. I am not fond of having dog hair and footprints all over our stuff and this way he still feels like he is part of the family. (In the picture Max is not in the den, he is sneaking a snooze on Sam's Hello Kitty pillow which I found humorous.)

Dutch Oven cooking! I finally resurrected our dutch oven which got caught in a huge storm camping at Shenandoah a couple years back... even though it was under a tarp, the rain was pelting sideways and we literally had a streams running under our tent and thru the campsite (another story for another time)... so our poor dutch oven rusted like mad. We were very new to using one and didn't realize the need to deal with it immediately. We are now older and wiser and I have painstakingly stripped, and restripped and stripped again to get rid of all the rust. We made German Pancakes, Mountain Man breakfast and peach cobbler. All turned out very yummy! However, hunger is the best sauce.. it took soo long for everything to cook, that may be the main reason everyone thought it was so good haha. I just need to figure out how to use the coals more effectively, it seems everything took twice as long and triple the number of coals recommended for it to get cooked. Granted it was pretty windy in the mornings and evenings but still... I hope to get more practice in this summer and nail down the technique.


Krazy Kids!! Right before we left on Monday we took group pictures. I dont have the whole group pic yet but here are the kids being.. well.. kids. We had such a great time, the kids all got along wonderfully (well ok, a few incidents of drama with Mandi.. but then what can you expect snicker.) Notice Max is NOT in the picture. The dog here is Sierra, who belongs to the Brick family. The minute we started breaking camp Max climbed in the van and refused to budge. I can't decide if he was just anxious to get home or afraid we would leave him haha. The poor guy is not a fan of camping.. we have a hard time getting him to eat while camping, but he does like the family time, the great outdoors and all the fun hikes.