Ethan dances with Tigger, and Abbey feeds her doll

Ethan loves to dance with Tigger. And Abigail is really starting to use her imagination as she takes care of her dolls: besides feeding them, she also puts them to bed and changes their diapers.

Ethan's first shoes

This was taken sometime in early to mid August, shortly after he started walking. He'd just been to Walmart with Debbie to get his very first shoes.

Ethan's first peach

Ethan found a peach on the table and wandered off with it. Debbie said he ate about half of it, which is pretty good for only having his front teeth.

Ethan Making Friends with Striker

Striker hasn't been all that enthusiastic about having kids in the house. It's hard to find a peaceful place where they won't bother him. There are some benefits, however...

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Ethan's getting pretty good at feeding himself, although not so neatly. Sometimes he falls asleep before lunch is over.

Chic Abbey

The sunglasses were lost, and then they were found. Pictures were taken, and now they are lost again...

Abbey lost a fight...with a mosquito.

Abigail looks like she lost a fight, but it's just a mosquito bite under the eye that swelled up. Or maybe this is after she slipped at church and hit her head on the pew. Either way, we're thankful it didn't take long to heal.

She wasn't as miserable as looks: I think she just woke up in these pictures. :)

Siblings

Abbey and Ethan make quite a pair!

Fence Project, part 2

Stage two is the "temporary" fence between the garage and the house. The ground was rocky enough that it was easier to dig with my hands, although that turned to be not such a good idea when I found sheets of rusty metal underground.

Fence Project, part 1

Next project is to fence in the yard. Because most of the yard is publicly visible, we don't want to do something cheap like chain-link. Instead we're going to use aluminum, which looks like wrought iron but isn't as expensive.

Still, it costs enough that we will have to do it in sections. The plan is to build a temporary wooden fence between the garage and the house, and then put up part of the aluminum fencing each year until the whole yard is fenced, at which point the temporary wooden fence can come down.

The first part of the fence project is close the gap between the garage and the neighbor's fence.

Setting up the playground

Back at the end of July, we set up an otherwise hard-to-use area of the backyard as a playground for the kids. That entailed digging up the scrawny weeds, leveling the ground as much as possible, bordering it with homegrown Michigan rocks, and covering it with pea gravel.