Giddyup!

Giddyup!, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

Just more trip cuteness. :) The local ice cream place has a lot of these saddles around for the kids to ride, and Sofie thinks that's pretty fantastic. Same goes for the ice cream - she can't get enough. As long as it's "brown" - no other ice cream but chocolate exists in toddler world.

It's 95 here today and supposed to be hotter tomorrow. We may just eat ice cream for meals if it gets much warmer.

twister1

twister1, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

A little later into the trip, the Committee took a break from their offsite work to play a little twister. Unfortunately, as in all things, their business-oriented focus prevented the game from really taking off as they found themselves all in a single row again, facing forward, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

Thankfully, a few other animals jumped in to help bring this party to life.

Sofie, leading the hike

Sofie, leading the hike, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

We went on a short hike on the Methow Community Trail yesterday, a local path that runs from Mazama to Winthrop. Sofie wasn't a huge fan of the hiking, but for a while she ran ahead and blazed a trail for us. Then she started collecting cottonwood droppings and pine cones and ended up having a great time.

Sofie is a bit confused about the concept of "vacation," thinking this is a term that refers to the actual, physical place that you're sleeping. After this hike, she informed as that she wanted to go back to Vacation and have a sandwich.

We keep trying to explain to her that the cabin is our CABIN and vacation is the whole experience of being here, but she's not having it. The cabin is Vacation, and everything else we do is just random fun.

The Committee has an offsite

The Committee has an offsite, originally uploaded by Brett&MeganZalkan.

We're off at our favorite cabin in the Methow Valley for a week or so. This is Sofie's third trip to the eastern Cascades since she was born, and her second time in this particular cabin. This trip, I let her pack her own toy bag and was amused to find, shortly after we got here, that she had crammed the entire Committee in there. About twenty minutes after we arrived, she had the entire group arrayed around her small playhouse, listening attentively to orange cat, who seemed to be speaking to the group from his perch on the second floor.

"It's an offsite," said Brett.

True, true.

Bathing beauty

Sofie got into her pool today for the first time all summer after finding the wading pool utterly terrifying for the last six or eight weeks. Today, after her usual round of throwing her toys in and watching them swim instead of her, she came over and asked me to take her shoes off so she could walk around in the water, and from there it was a short trip to swim diapers and a suit and laying on her belly trying to swim for real.

And a fedora, of course.

What a cutie patootie.

Storque!

Hey! Haven't posted in a while but just wanted to stop in to mention that I got featured in the Storque, Etsy's blog, this weekend! Click here to visit the Etsy Weekend Deals article. My item is the light blue and yellow daisy crayon roll about 2/3rds of the way down the page.

I was featured because I'm offering free shipping on everything in the shop until Monday morning. Stop in for some great deals - although I'm practically sold out on crayon and pencil rolls all of a sudden!!




I was really excited about this because in addition to sitting on the blog, these deals get mailed out to thousands of subscribers on Fridays. I had a huge day yesterday because of this and am running at something like 22 sales already this weekend, more than tripled my site visits, and am all around on a high from this!

I took some stats snapshots right before the mail went out, and I'll be analyzing the overall effects of getting featured at the end of the weekend to see exactly how big of a spike it brought in, so stay tuned - I'll post the results!

Happy fourth of July, everyone!