A Charlotte Post

Charlotte is such a joy. She loves to play with her Little People and will ask you to come "sit" or "play" with her all the time. She will also play by herself too. The most common playtime activity is setting up the little people in their chairs. There is a character for each of us; she is usually Princess Jasmine. Word of advice, she doesn't like when Baloo the Bear from The Jungle Book comes knocking at the door of her house.

She's a pretty picky eater nowadays, so we have to do some searching to find something for her to eat when we go out. That's nothing new to us since we live with Noah. She really likes chocolate and cookies.

Playing in the house with Noah's Hawaii leis

Her hair finally grew long enough that I could just about put it in a real "big girl" pony tail

She walked up to me out of the blue one day with this chef hat on and asked me to put the apron on her too. She is such a smart cookie.

We really like having girl time. This was a girls only lunch we went on in July.

And later that day with some kind of chocolate treat all over our face

And still later when we went out for dinner at a food truck

Wyatt and I bought her a little pink hat at Lincoln Park Zoo and she loves it. Sometimes she doesn't feel ready to go anywhere until she has her hat on.

A smile that could melt a million hearts

Playing with her new CeCe doll (Doc McStuffin's little sister)

She was so sure that she wasn't sleepy. All that learning and playing really tuckers her out.

Making a Splash

We had some fun cooling off this summer. We brought out the big inflatable pool for a swim day in June and we filled the little pool for Charlotte. She didn't like either, so she spent most of the time trying to avoid them. She also didn't like that the boys had a squirt gun fight and she was sometimes the unlucky victim.

Another day I had an unexpected afternoon off of work due to a power outage, so I took the kids to the splash pad. The boys love this particular splash pad because there is a sand play area nearby.

Noah also continued his weekly swim lessons. He is still in yellow (third level) and working on his forward strokes.

One day while I was working, Charlotte was napping, and Noah was at Camp, Wyatt decided to have a little pool party all by himself

In July, we attended Nick's work pool party. It was a little chilly (it's always after-hours), but the boys still enjoyed it and they collected a ton of money during the coin drop.
 

The Day the Rain Caused a Ruckus

One week at the end of June, Noah had a three-day Green Thumb camp at the Nature Center and I had to take off the Wednesday to take him. I wanted to make sure we utilized my day off instead of just sitting around, so I planned a couple activities. While Noah was at camp, I took the other two to a "messy" class at the library. It was supposed to be outdoors, but it was raining, so they brought it indoors and due to the change in location, it wasn't really that messy.

After we picked up Noah and had lunch, we planned to head over to a local farm that was hosting Wednesday play days all summer (they were only open on Wednesdays). When we got there, they informed me that due to the morning rain and another storm that was "imminent" they were closing the rest of the day. I knew this was absurd because I had checked the radar and the storm was hours away and it currently was only drizzling from the last storm. This put a crimp in my plans so I quickly thought of somewhere else to go. Since we hang out at our Nature Center so much (and since Noah was just there that morning) that wouldn't have been very special. So instead, we headed over to another town's Nature Center to play.

Notice how I planned ahead and the kids were all wearing their rain boots. We were so prepared for a squishy farm.

 Charlotte did not like the snakey.

After playing inside for a while, we headed outside to explore.

Notice how it's not raining. Two and a half hours later we drove back home. It still wasn't raining. I really wanted to drive back to the farm and say, told ya so.