Other Summer Adventures

Eva bought with her own money a butterfly kit. We sent for the butterflys they arrived in the mail as little caterpillars. They went through each stage and turned into these beauties. It was quite neat and worth every penny.

Pretty soon after we moved here in the summer the Bacylons came up to Reno to visit their family. We meet them at Sand Harbor for a beautiful day at the beach. The kids had a blast and I had so much fun chatting with Carrie and her family.

The kids and the Baclyons poor uncle that had to row them around. 

Baby Claire must have loved the waves on the beach and wind because she took like a 3 hour nap.

Ronan having a blast on there blow up wave runners.  

 Our best friends up here the Smiths took us up to Donner Lake for an after work wave runner ride. It was a blast. And a wave runner is definitely on the list of must haves up here.

Dave's work had a party at a baseball game in Reno. We lasted about half the game.

We took innumerable amount of trips to the beach. This was one of my favorites at the lake. We also have a country club pool we have access to through Dave's work we went to nearly every week.

Rock Climbing

We spent one Saturday on a grand adventure around Lake Tahoe. The day started off with a very long drive to get to a wonderful hike to waterfalls and a castle. But when we got there we found that there was no parking anywhere in site. So we found this wonderful rock garden to explore and climb around in.  Dave wrote a blog article for North Star about the day. Check it out it is really wonderfully written. http://buzz.snow.com/channels/mountain_channels/northstar_at_tahoe/b/weblog/archive/2011/09/16/irish-memories-come-to-life-at-lake-tahoe.aspx

Ronan is a maniac when it comes to climbing rocks. He wants the biggest and steepest ones. He spotted this rock and begging to climb it said, "I want to climb this one it is the real deal."

After the rock climbing we drove all the way around Lake Tahoe. I got to see South Lake Tahoe where we stopped for some lunch and a trip to the park. This was the extent of Claire's excitement for the day.

Papa's Visit

My dad bless his heart drove back from Utah with us since Dave was in Ireland. Baby Claire does not love the car for long distances. So there really isn't any other way to do it myself. We had just enough time to show him around to our favorite places. This picture is a nice trail that we have that runs next to the Truckee River. The kids road their scooters and we ran after them.

 

My kids adore my dad. He is so great to play cards with them, wrestle, and he was a good help to me.  It was nice to not be by myself while Dave was gone.

As soon as we got home from the trip Eva and I hopped in the car to go to a Colbie Caillat concert at North Star resort.

She was fantastic. We had the most amazing seats really close up. Eva lasted about half way through then she was falling asleep on my lap. It had been a long day.

Our favorite summer activity is riding the Gondola up to the top of the mountain. The kids love it.

Claire giggled the whole way up from the tickles in her tummy