Dominican Republic

 

 We had an amazing Lambert family reunion in the Dominican Republic this summer. It was perfect...the surroundings, the activities and the company.

My favorite spot was the lagoon we hiked to...it was beautiful.

 Lyla especially liked waving to the turtles.

 Olivia celebrated her 5th birthday while we there. She was excited to be able to have all of her family there. One of her gifts was her first pet, one of her cousins gave her a hermit crab...unfortunately the crab was dead by the end of the party.

The girls were able to go horseback riding. Olivia really enjoyed the ride.

...Lyla on the other hand immediately started crying.

 After petting the horse and me convincing her that the horse was nice, she quickly changed her tune and loved her horse ride. She kept repeating "nice...nice" as the horse trotted along. Her favorite part was when the horse really started galloping...she laughed and laughed.

I'm often surprised when we come across something unfamiliar to my girls because they live in the city. On this trip I realized that Lyla had never seen stars. In the city you can't see stars, but at night when we would walk back to our little casita the sky was full of beautiful stars and Lyla was captivated. Her head was cocked back the entire walk and she would repeat again and again, "stars...stars."

Lyla did NOT like Matthew buried in the sand, she quickly tried to dig him free.

Sometimes the waits at the restaurants were long...Lyla found ways to entertain herself.

We all loved this trip and would love to go back!

Cousins..Cousins..Cousins

Olivia and Lyla kicked off the summer this year by spending a lot of time with their cousins. We went to Maryland for baby Harlow's blessing and ended up staying the week and we are sure glad we did!

 

Lyla loved baby Harlow and continued to repeat "sshhh...baby sleeping" everytime she saw her.

We got back to New York just in time for the Haslam girls to drive down from Massachusetts for a fun weekend.

Before the horrible rain storm.

 After trekking through the city in the horrible rain storm.

Saturday afternoon we went to see the Broadway musical, Newsies. When the curtains opened on a scene of orphan boys, one of which had a crutch and severe limp...I knew this was going to be trouble for my tender-hearted Olivia. We didn't make it 10 seconds into the play before Olivia was crying and expressing great concern for the injured boy. I spent the next few minutes pretty much re-writing the script. "These boys are best friends and get to work together...how fun is that!" That didn't seem to ease her concern and gratefully she got up on my lap and went right to sleep.

 

 Although she slept through over half of the show, that didn't stop her from collecting autographs from some of the stars of the show. We may not have gotten our moneys worth out of the show ticket, but we sure got our moneys worth out of the show program, Olivia spent the next week looking through all the actor's headshots again and again, memorizing their names

We finished off our fun weekend by stopping in Times Square, got our picture and message on a big jumbo tron and enjoyed our 15 seconds of fame

It sure has been great having family move out East, hopefully we will enjoy more cousin filled weeks soon!

Lyla

Lyla has had a rough week. This was the second week she has been suffering from an unknown tropical illness. On top of that she also has strep throat. This week has been full of doctor appointments and a 9 hour visit to the Emergency Room. Yesterday she went to the hospital again for her second round of blood testing. As we left the hospital, Olivia decided that after all this, Lyla definitely deserved an ice cream...Lyla agreed!

 

 

Wedding & More Utah Fun!

 Olivia had been looking forward to being a flower girl at Liz's wedding and she was just thrilled to preform one of her important duties of carrying the wedding dress.

 Lyla was just captivated by the musicians.

 

After the wedding was over we decided to stay around Utah a little longer, and the girls really enjoyed the extra time with family!

 This is only the second time Lyla has been in Utah to see her extended family, but she seemed to take to everyone very quickly.

 While we were in Utah, I decided to go to Bakersfield to see my grandparents. Lyla was a trooper and did so well on this world-wind trip. We headed to the SLC airport, waited for our delayed flight to finally leave, flew to LAX, drove 2.5 hours to Bakersfield, spent 20 minutes with my grandparents drove back to LA  and then a flight back to SLC. It was an extremely short visit, but we enjoyed every second!