The Guddat Gang

This is Jon. Happy 4th of July. We spent the day in Ellensburg celebrating the 125th anniversary of the great fire that burned Ellensburg on July 4th 1889. To my knowledge only one building remains of the downtown core that was built before the "Great Fire". All other buildings more than 100 years old were built starting the day after the fire. And so ends our history lesson for today. We spent some of the day at the Kittitas County Historical Museum, which had plenty of artifacts and pictures of Ellensburg from the 1850s on. We moved into a more "modern" area of the museum where the girls found something foreign. Rotary phones. Bouncy houses at the park. Me trying to show Dee how to rope. It was at this point where Delaney realized "Dad travels for rodeo, interviews and writes rodeo, watches rodeo...but can't rope." It was a demoralizing moment for the both of us. The pyros with roman candles. I'm trying to find words which s

This is Jon. More random shots of my girls enjoying the summer. D and B showing off the raspberry bounty. The girls often head up in the tree to pick Rainier cherries. Sometimes it's by ladder. Most of the time it's simply climbing. Rainier cherries. Straight up natural. No bugs no chemicals. This pic is a week old and I'm positive our pumpkin plants are double this size and are ready to vine over the planter boxes. In six or seven years, we haven't had any luck with pumpkins in the ground. This year seems slightly different. All you really need is an 80-degree evening and a sprinkler and you've got plenty of fun. Dee is into snakes. Adelyn is into bugs...which has gotten Delaney into bugs. Adelyn wears this around her neck like a phat medallion and then goes into the garden to find bugs and always comes back with something that makes Brittany squirm.

This is Jon. We bought a bigger tent this summer and we of course needed to test it out. We chose Cooper Lake, which has always been a day drive/hike destination for us. Cooper is one of those places where we go on a Sunday afternoon or a mid-week day so usually no one is there. When you camp on a major weekend, the place is packed, but most of the sites at Cooper are very secluded. That's what you get with a hike-in campsite atmosphere. My fellow campers. They were beside themselves excited for the weekend. Who is focusing on the rocks Adelyn is showing off while Delaney loses balance on her way into the lake? It was rainy the entire time. It wasn't necessarily cold, so the girls still really wanted to go in the raft on the lake. Once we put the raft in the lake, it started raining pretty good and the temp dropped a bit (or it seemed like it, based on my fleece I was wearing, does it look like February or a week before July?). We manned up and did it, whi