August Begins

We kicked off the month of August with a fabulous day of family fun! After our morning nap, we headed up to Houston to run a Carmax errand. The girls behaved beautifully in the waiting room, munching on crackers, and laughing on command... "laugh" is one of our new vocabulary words :)

On the subject of words, we've been counting them up, and the girls can produce 44 words... which means that Mom and Dad can understand the words, and that they are (more or less) distinct sounds that resemble (more or less) the real word. It's pretty exciting! They understand just about everything we say... whether they choose to follow our directions is a completely different story! We've had a few major shows of defiance... mostly from Izzy. Ahh, a foretaste of things to come...

Since we were up toward Houston, we took the opportunity to have lunch at Mom's favorite restaurant, Macaroni Grill! MMMM. Delicious. And then, we headed over to the Houston Arboretum at Memorial Park. It was fantastic!

First, we stopped in at the nature center, where the girls learned about local wildlife and talked to the docent about the sounds that fish make.

We had a great time walking (and running) on the trails... the girls had an incredible time, and might have run for miles if it hadn't been so dang hot!

The girls talked about the trees, which were excitingly tall, and about the birds, and of course, about the sticks and leaves that they found on the trail. I'm excited to bring them back when it gets a little cooler!

After Abby's cheeks turned bright red, we scooped the girls up and headed back to the Nature Center, where the girls experienced a drinking fountain for the first time. Abby got the hang of it pretty quickly, but Izzy couldn't stop giggling long enough to get anything to drink.

After a nap in the car and a quick dinner, the girls wanted to go back outside. Their new trick on the playset is to use the bar above the slide as a swinging bar... which is fine sometimes, but not so much when they do it at the same time, so that neither girl has both feet above the slide...

I'm not sure if it's official yet, but if our green (and rapidly growing) lawn is any indication, we think the drought in our area is over! Hurray! We do know that the mandatory water restrictions in our city have been lifted, so we're allowed to swim in the kiddie pool again... HOORAY!!!!