The last of our vacation...

So, Ben is officially done with his vacation time and back at work today (too bad it's a Sunday!). He's had the last 8 days off, most of which we spent on our cabin trip, but these last few days we managed to find some fun things to do as well. I took the girls to see Toy Story on Friday morning, which I thought was seriously hilarious! Ben was nice and offered to be the one to stay home with Jake - he got to take the girls to the last kids movie (The Princess and the Frog), so he figured it was my turn. We even used a couple of our free movie tickets (which Ben seems to routinely win at work), so it was a $5 outing. Nice! I laughed so hard in this movie... and then, for some reason, I cried like a baby at the end. What is wrong with me?!! I never would have thought that Toy Story would be emotional for me. ;) Emma cried too, but for different reasons... she got really frightened during a couple parts - that poor girl gets so scared of stuff sometimes. She's been having lots of nightmares lately too - everything is just so REAL to her right now and sometimes has a hard time separating reality from pretend. So, I had both girls on my lap towards the end of the movie (Becca because she couldn't see and I neglected to get a booster for her and Emma because she was frightened)... from this experience I learned that they have very boney little bums. ;)


On Friday night we made a delicious dinner! We had teriyaki kebabs (using the same recipe my cute sister used when she cooked for us last time she was visiting) with rice. Emma had picked out a fun drink from her Princess Cookbook that we made to go with it - Homemade Vanilla Cherry Cream Soda. Mmmmm. Then for dessert, I had dived back into some old Everyday Food mags and made these yummy ice cream sandwiches. Summer food is really the BEST.

On Saturday we drove across town to Ben's parents home and Grandma Dangerfield took Emma and Becca to see The Wizard of Oz play at the Queen Creek Performing Arts Center. They loved it! And it looks like the plan is to all be Wizard of Oz characters for Halloween this year. Emma wants to be Dorothy and Becca wants to be a Flying Monkey ("because I like monkeys!" says Becca). While they were out at the play, Grandpa stayed home with Jake while he napped and Ben and I got to go out on a little outing... always such a luxury to go out without the kids! We went to The Dump in Tempe... an oddly named furniture store, but we found lots of things we would have loved to purchase if only we had more money. ;) Afterwards we went to Sonic because I wanted ice cream. Ben insisted that I try the Limeade Chiller... we got the strawberry kind and it's now my new FAVORITE ice cream treat!

Apparently the girls also entertained themselves this weekend by using my camera to take pics of each other. When I went to upload them to my camera recently, I found all these shots of Becca, which Emma must have taken of her. She's such a card!