Outdoor Fun

'Tis the season for graduation open houses, picnics with friends, and neighborhood block parties. We attended all three on Saturday. Which means, of course, that the eating was good! Really, really good. Good tasting, not so good for trying to eat healthy.

The highlight of the day was when the fire engine came to the block party. D and the other little girls (yes, the girls) stood with eyes wide and mouths open anticipating a chance to climb aboard. A year ago she was terrified of them, but this year she was one of the first to line up. M seemed to enjoy getting aboard, too.


Three year olds have a way of making you listen to them. D repeated several times that she wanted to get on her swim suit and go down the water slide they had set up at the block party. We didn't even have her suit with us and other parents advised us the water was really cold. We distracted her with food (dinner) and playing with other kids her age. But, she kept going back over to the water. The next thing I know, she is standing in the kiddie pool set up next to the slide, buck naked. I'm not sure if we're being invited back next year or not...

Today (Sunday), we packed up the kids, bikes, Burley, dinner, snacks and headed to Stillwater. We ate at a random park we found, then rode our bikes on the Gateway Trail. We were on the road for over an hour, but actual bike time was less (maybe 45-50 minutes) due to multiple pit stops to peel M's hands off of D's head/legs/arms/hair/etc. He really knows how to push her buttons. We quickly depleted our snack supply (we had just eaten dinner!) trying to occupy his hands with food instead of using them to annoy his sister.


We ended the biking trip with a stop at Cup 'N Cone (a mom and pop DQ--kiddie cones for 35 cents!). M has recently decided (like overnight) he will not eat ANYTHING unless he can feed it to himself with either a spoon or a fork, neither of which he can use very well. A week ago he used them as drumsticks or javelins. Which made eating an ice cream cone, well, quite interesting. He did pretty good, actually.

Memorial Day Weekend Part 2

This post contains pictures from Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend. We spent the day at my parent's house at the lake. The weather was perfect and the lake water temperature was really nice. Both D and M spent 90% of their time in the water. They just loved it!












The bottom picture is actually a video of D and M playing in the water. Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend!

Memorial Day Weekend

Welcome to the Stiehl Family Blog! I decided to start a blog to share what's going on in our lives (in case you're interested). My goal is to update this once a week, so hopefully I can keep up with that.

It is Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend and we have already accomplished several things on our to do list. The kids and I had a play date yesterday morning and the whole family went for an evening walk with our friends Steve and Martha, who recently moved within walking distance of our house. Today, Steve planted a vegetable garden and I got our patio ready by sweeping and setting out our chairs and table. We also had our friend Julia and her niece Sienna over for an after-dinner play date.

The pictures you see are of our trip to the Children's Museum last weekend. D is modeling a set of cardinal wings and M is venturing down a slide that comes out of a little cave he crawled through. They both had a great time and it was so nice to let M run around and touch everything! I spend much of my time these days removing his hands or body from things he shouldn't touch or do, so this was a nice change of pace.

Our cute little D: Our friends Steve and Martha announced that they are expecting, and we told D that Martha has a baby in her stomach. She asked, "Why did she eat the baby?" Then she wanted to know if Steve also had a baby in his stomach--she was totally confused!