In March, Grandma Celeste flew out from Utah to come visit for a week. Grandma Celeste always has the most fascinating stories about growing up in a log cabin in the wilderness of Alaska, and entertained the girls with tales of her adventures as a young girl– making friends with Eskimos, encountering bears, exploring the woods, you name it! She’s written a few fiction and non-fiction books about her life and that of her parents, so she had lots of material to draw from for her story-telling! I don’t know how many times I can downstairs to find the girls sitting at the table listening to a Grandma Celeste story!

We had a very warm week while she was here and made it to the beach a few times.

Floating on logs in the creek… don’t want to know what’s in there.

Cooling off in the pool.

Enjoying a soak in the hot tub after a long day of running around.

The girls thought it would be funny to dogpile on grandma and wake her up. Welcome to our world.

Grandma Celeste accompanied us to the twins’ softball game on Saturday morning. Meredith occupied herself with trying to catch Eleanor and apply sunscreen to her entire body.

Grandma Celeste loves to paint, especially in watercolors, and brought some of her supplies along. She set up her canvas and painted on the beach and spent hours painting with the girls at home. She painted them some still lifes of some pretty lilies we had in our house:

She helped the girls paint some water colors of their own and they had a blast since they LOVE art.

After hearing all of the Alaska stories from Grandma, Amelia and Samantha chose Alaska for their state research project at school.

And since the girls all love flowers so much, we took a day trip to see the millions of ranunculus flowers at the Carlsbad Flower Fields.

After taking a wagon ride through the flowers and playing on the fairy playground, the girls did a scavenger hunt.

Thanks for coming, Grandma Celeste!

Lots of love,