Celebrating Ben's Birthday

In celebration of Ben's 8th birthday, we took a gaggle of friends to Seven Peaks (our local waterpark).  It was a super-fun celebration of our super-fun kid, and all the more enjoyable for all because we're in that miraculously wonderful stage when kids get old enough to go romp in the park alone with occasional check-ins!  Being 8 has it's perks.

The boys had a ton of fun, and sunglasses ended up being the perfect party favor

Click on this one and zoom in to see Ben's priceless expression of sheer terror.  Daddy bribed him to try the slide with an extra two hours of play time :)

I had a great time hanging out with my girls

WanYing puts her feet up in the lazy river (those swimmies are awesome!  I'm a total believer)

Dinner time! Pizza, of course (is there any other meal ever served at kids' birthday parties?)

My little Sunshine

And since we couldn't bring a cake into the park, and they don't sell them there (this seems like poor planning on their part to me), we improvised with a pile o' churros!  Ben was thrilled - this may become a tradition.

The churros were a huge hit, although Sasha and WanYing just licked the cinnamon sugar off and left the donut part :)

Happy birthday Ben!

Ski Jumping... in July

We spent last weekend with some friends in a condo in Park City - a little stay-cation :) It was a great time, and one of the highlights was the aerials class that Ben took up at the Olympic Park. Watching your seven-year-old don skis and a wetsuit and fly off of a ramp into a pool is an experience not soon forgotten.

Here's Ben's description of the adventure:
I had trouble swimming with skis on.

I was jumping off of a jump into a pool that was pretty cold. I was doing it because it looked pretty fun. It looked easy from the start when everybody else was doing it 'cause they were professionals.

I didn't really ever get to the really big jumps. The only things that I did was mini trampoline, a rampless jump (by rampless I mean that it didn't go into the water) and a ramp jump. My favorite picture is the one where I did a belly flop trying to do a flip. Maybe sometime I'll do it again but hopefully the water won't be so cold and we won't need dry or wet suits. The reason that we didn't like the wetsuits was because that they were pretty hard to put on and get off.

The best part was the jump that had a ramp. The worst part was probably the rampless jumps; you had to climb up it so it was pretty hard to climb up but the medium part was the mini-tramp.

The end.

And here are a few more shots from the afternoon:

The pros show us how it's done (granted, they are probably a little older than seven)

Sasha watches her bro in style

Exiting the pool with skis was a challenge

I think he has perfected his on-ramp form

This year, summer camp. Next year, Olympic training?

Goodbye, Disney World

I'm thinking that a full week of posts about our Florida adventures is pushing it, so I'll combine the last 2 days into one chock-full-of-fun post.

Here's our mini-golf experience in the fewest words possible: hot, Sasha cheated (a lot), boys had trouble with high-sticking, boys loved holes with squirt-gun traps, lots of fun.
Our last stop in the Florida-Kazakhstan adventure was the Typhoon Lagoon water park. Man, do I love water parks. I'm so glad my whole family feels the same way!

Ben was ready to go swim before we even purchased our tickets!

Sash loved it all - and her haircut doesn't look quite so rediculous when it's wet, right? (just let me live in my delusions)

The wave pool was a total blast. Ben loved being thrown over the waves (he's the dot wearing a blue lifevest), while Sam preferred to be carried by them - needless to say, we all got a workout!

One last hurrah with the Beasleys
We had a fantastic time hanging out in Florida with such wonderful families. A week definitely wasn't long enough - who's planning next year's reunion?!?

Want Go Swimmie!

The theme parks were fantastic, but the reoccurring theme of our Florida adventure was definitely the hotel swimming pool, as seen here from our 15th floor balcony. Sasha must have chanted the phrase, "want go swimmie!" 500 times over the course of the week. It was kid heaven, and Mom and Dad definitely liked the admission price :)

Any pool with a pirate ship is ok by me. Especially if it has a poolside bar.


Did we mention that the pirate ship had a water slide? Here's Steve and Ben rushing out.
Sam found that this shirt slowed down the ride a bit...
Whenever I "lost" Ben in the pool he was always found lounging in the hot tub
Ladder + inflatable swimmie = stuck
Hooray for the swimming pool!

Ben's New Pool Skills

With our rainy and windy weather in Oregon, we spent a lot of time in the condo complex's indoor pool, which the kids adored. On the final day of our trip, all of the skills learned in years of swimming lessons finally clicked for Ben and he started swimming, on his own! Needless to say, we were all very proud.

Here are the photos taken exclusively for this blog post (I never tire of hearing the kids say, "Mom, take a picture of me now, it's going to be awesome on the blog!"):Yes, you read that little number over Steve's shoulder correctly, my little boy is swimming, on his own, in the 8-foot section of the pool!

Hitting the 'Peaks

We are certainly a family of waterbugs and Sasha has taken to the pool like... um... like a fish to water. Sorry, the colloquialisms and analogies ran away with me there.

We have season passes to Seven Peaks, which rocks because we can just go for a couple of hours without feeling like we have to make our visit worth the price of a day's admission. And now that Sam finished his level two swim lessons he's feeling a lot more confident on his own in the water (and we feel much more confident that we will leave the pool with the no fewer children than we started with!).

Another big perk of having an eight-year-old who swims on his own is that he tows our tube around the lazy river and wave pool - no more tedious and exhausting paddling! Phew - for a while there I was worried that I might actually work off those pool-concession-stand-churro-and-pizza calories!

Here are a few more shots from our latest afternoon at Seven Peaks - these were all taken in the baby pool since it's the only place in the park where we have two free hands for photos :)

Ben now refuses to stay still so that we can take a picture, so here's the best photo we got of him sprinting past the camera.


A happy Mama and Sasha hang out in the baby pool (excuse the squinting, it was a bright Utah day!)

Overheard in the East

A few oft-heard quotes from our trip back east:

Ben: Ugh! The air here is so polluted! When I breathe in it upsets my stomach! [We can't blame him for the confusion between pollution and humidity; both suck the will to live straight out of you]

Sam: [While stomping up the steps to Aunt Susie's house] I. HATE. THIS. AIR.

Ben: In Maryland, there are lots and lots of cars but they don't go very fast. [Observed in a traffic jam, although also could be said of most of our five-hour, 55-MPH drive. Man does 55 feel slow when you're used to 65- or 75-MPH speed limits]

Sam: This is way better than Seven Peaks! [Exclaimed while comparing the beach to the wave pool at our local waterpark]

Editor's note: the photos have nothing to do with the content of this post, they're just a few cute shots from Virginia Beach that didn't fit in any other post :)

Swim Lessons

Nothing says "Summer Vacation" like swim lessons! Both boys are enrolled this year and are doing great, I think they may be destined to swim team greatness like their mother (my swim team career lasted only one season when I discovered that it's actually a lot of work and I didn't posses the natural speed or strength of a dolphin).

Here's a quick pic of the swim lesson bike train leaving the station. For those tracking Sam's two-wheel progress, he's still practicing and so prefers the tag-along bike for longer treks.

So far Ben prides himself on his back float, although I thought that the picture of the front float was more entertaining. The problem with floating on your front, according to Ben, is that you're supposed to blow out bubbles but when your tanks are empty then there's nothing more to blow out and you can't breathe in water. I find the logic unassailable.

Sam is swimming unassisted now and doing really well. Here he is swimming across the 13-foot-deep section of the pool! Apparently the parents were advised on the first day of class not to watch their children in lessons and I'm assuming this is because the reasonable parents would freak about about their child's barely-above-water status in thirteen feet of water. Fortunately the teenage instructor knows better than I do - Sam's doing wonderfully in class and hasn't drowned once.