While weather this summer is still cold and overall dreary, our activities and adventures are anything but! The girls are much more self sufficient this summer season and find ways to entertain themselves, sometimes together and sometimes separately, and while the fighting and whining is still pretty constant, the parents also have more opportunities to do activities themselves that were impossible a year or two ago with three littles. It’s so nice, but also a little sad that my babies are now so grown up and independent!

We finally broke out the princess Lego sets, a first for all three. In years past many hours were spent with Duplo blocks and Craig even built a customized duplo table so building was off the floor. We held off on the smaller Legos for quite a while, knowing they will probably play and create with them for a number of years in the future and we didn’t need to rush into it. We also wanted to avoid stepping on those tiny pieces for as long as humanly possible; and here we are!

I started the first age-four set with Emerie, letting her choose which one she wanted to build. Not shockingly, she chose the tiny Elsa castle set. I was quite impressed at her ability to understand the directions without too much prompting; her hardest part was finding the pieces in the parts box, not the actual construction of it. This is likely due to seeing things close up with her weaker eye; and she powered through and had fun putting it together. She will likely be a Lego builder in the future!

By that point Reagan and Harper were hovering and up close and personal, trying to see exactly what Emerie was building. Craig started the next princess set with Reagan and I opened one for Harper. Reagan was much happier to let Craig build the parts together than do it herself. Harper did pretty well finding pieces but also wanted more help snapping them into place. We will get there.

The girls also asked for pretty colors in their hair again, and since I’m not about to actually dye their beautiful blonde locks that I assume will be either dirty blonde or light brown by the time they’re teenagers; Craig pulled out the temporary pink, purple and teal hair dye. He added stripes to one side of each kiddo head and they all sat still as it set. With all three colors, that meant he also had the joy of climbing in the shower and washing colors out one at a time, kid by kid. I definitely caught Reagan and Harper posing, singing and brushing the fancy locks in front of the mirror in the master closet later that night. Emerie’s colors ended up the most faded. We may have to add some more this weekend. This week the girls kept taking out their braids, claiming that they needed to show classmates and aides the fancy colors.

We had another first this week, channeling back to our three-year-old days of mischievousness. Craig refilled the tiki torches on the back deck and I set down lighter fluid container with about half left. Little did we know later that night the girls spent a good amount of time making flower and grass soup outside in their playhouse…with an added element of the REST of the lighter fluid. A little more flavor?! How the toxic smell didn’t stop them from playing with it is beyond me. We didn’t notice the occurrence of this activity until right at bedtime that night, when Reagan ran outside to get her beloved “tiny panda” and it came in wreaking like strong paint thinner. She was NOT pleased that into the washer it went; and even less pleased that the smell was irreversible and Mr. Panda’s new home was the outside trash can. Thank goodness for eBay; a new one is on order and in the mail!

Fourth of July weekend was uneventful overall and we mostly stayed close to home. The girls rode bikes and played outside, did some crafts and we watched them disassemble their new Lego sets. For some reason they refuse to let any of the Lego figurines keep their hair and we continue to find those pieces all over the place. Pretty sure I will glue those in place before we permanently lose them. We spent the afternoon of July 4th out in Chugiak, about 20 minutes out of town, at the holiday parade, with great seats right along the roadway. The girls did not appreciate the police and fire sirens ten feet from them, but otherwise enjoyed waving flags and demanding candy from the brigade passing by. Reagan was especially excited over the vintage teal colored cars that went by while Emerie was much more enthusiastic about picking ALL the flowers in the right-of-way and “making” fireworks with them, and Harper just wanted to snuggle and eat snacks on my lap. At one point one of the homeowners shot off a couple fireworks and all three jumped out of their skin and ran to us. Clearly we’ve never been that close to loud fireworks, since last new years we didn’t successfully keep them outside to see them.

I’m happy to report no one ran out into the street during the entire thing and the rest of the day was spent with the cousins, building forts in the driveway out of kitchen remodel boxes and grilling out. Everyone was so tired by the end of the evening that we loaded all three into the car in total meltdown status, and everyone silently watched a My Little Pony episode the whole way home.

❤