we love our swing set

We built a swing set! Well, all of the dads built a swing set, and us girls watched and played while they did!

The dads get started in the garage... Although the girls like to "help"....

...we left them to build and we played in the sprinkler and baby pool in the back yard!

It's kind of goofy that the girls love this pool so much still because it's so tiny (we've had it since Sam was a baby)! They do love it though, so we get it out often!

Drying off so we can have a snack...
Our girls LOVE fresh berries, which makes mommy especially happy with a super picky eater to feed!

.....However, this was also the weekend we came to the conclusion of bad news on the berries. We are 99% sure that Natalie is allergic to at least one of them. She's been breaking out in rashes a lot lately but I figured it was just dry skin. We had a lot of berries the day before this day too, and by the end of the day, Natalie's rash was so bad is was near bleeding. And it was all over her body. :( My mom was the one that suggested it was berries, and after a couple of days of not feeding them to her, it cleared up completely. Now that she's clear, I'm going to feed them to her one type at a time and see what she reacts to (since it's not a dangerous reaction). I'm hoping it's only one of the four they were eating!!! I'm suspecting blackberries, but we'll see.

You can barely see the area to the right of her mouth is red and patchy - that's just a small sample of what happens when she eats them.
Meanwhile, the boys kept at work on the swingset!
...and worked
...and worked
...and finally came in for a quick lunch break!
My mom joined us all day to help me with the kids & lunch and ended up helping a lot with landscaping too!

It wasn't in the original plans, but our generous friends/neighbors decided it was time for us to also re-mulch our landscaping so they ordered twice what they needed! :) So, the girls and Dan laid all new mulch with Joe & Lisa's leftovers (thanks, Joe & Lisa!) while pulling weeds and trimming trees! The grandpas had to go out for more swing set parts so the timing was perfect!

The girls help after their naps... (Sam changes clothes about 100 times a day so she doesn't always match) :)

Dan "stealing" mulch from our friends!
Soon the swing set was ready to go in the back yard and be completed!

The monkey bars and last two-person swing still need to go up (missing pieces/need trimming first), but that hasn't stopped Sammi & Natalie from getting tons of use out of it just in the first week!
Climbing up is even better than climbing down!




We LOVE our swing set!!!!
Thanks so much to our families for putting it together for us!!!!