What can I say? It's been a busy summer. We're around home long enough to mess things up but not long enough to clean them up. It's starting to get a little dangerous to walk around our house. I guess that's the only reason to hope for crummy weather...so poor Parker can learn to walk without tripping every 10 seconds. Here's a little bit of what we've been up to this summer...
There are little skating classes during the week. I took both kids the first week thinking Evan would be the chicken and Maren would be a natural. Wrong! Evan loved it and was not afraid (shock of my life) and Maren, while not afraid, could not stay up to save her life. My arms and shoulders were so sore by the end of those 2 hours from holding her up that I vowed not to take her again for a long time.
There was the trip to our beautiful Chinese Gardens. The smells, the workmanship, the shapes, the textures...it's all so refreshing and relaxing. Evan took about 100 pictures there. He even worked on posing Maren jsut the way he wanted her in some of them. Ha! In the bottom one, he is imitating the foo dog above him. Silly guy.
There have been a dozen baths to clean dirty, smelly, sunscreen-covered kids. (I'm still not sure how my parents fit all four of us in a bathtub. Did they make bathtubs bigger back then??)
We've been beautifying our home with new heat-reducing fixtures...such as the emergency blanket over the skylight in the kitchen and the car's sun visor over the window in the office area. Boy, did Evan ever think it was awesome to get on the roof. Ever since then he has told friends, family and even perfect strangers that "I got to get on the roof once". And he's asked Michael a couple times if they could get on the roof again "for no reason at all". He says the view of the neighbor's Great Danes (yes, it's true!) is pretty sweet from up there. (Ha! Super side note...I just looked at the picture of them on the roof. Really looked at it. The point of the picture was Evan so I never really noticed that it's a pretty good bulls-eye bum shot of Michael. Oh well. He's not the focus in my mind and if I hadn't ever mentioned it, you probably wouldn't have even noticed it either!)
We attended our ward's Pioneer Day activity where they rode their bikes in the parade.
Michael set up the pool we got last year with our slide going into it. The kids have LOVED it! Evan Parker, who one day fell in head first after I propped him standing up on the outside (don't worry - I'm a super paranoid mom so I was very close and rescued him quickly). Parker's favorite thing to do is to try to drink the water, much to our dismay. Evan's favorite thing to do is pretend he's climbing up the slide but keep slipping down into the water. Maren just busts up laughing about it which fuels his comedy fire even more. Wondering what Michael's doing in that last picture? Shading Parker, who wasn't wearing any sunscreen. We took turns and then he taped the umbrella to a long stick so we wouldn't get sore shoulders. Ha! He's ingenious, I tell ya.
On top of all that, we've been to the park countless times, to the library, blueberry picking (yeah, Parker ate about a pint while we were picking and let's just say that his cheeks, no, not his face cheeks, were stained purple!), and to the county fair. Oh, how I wish I'd been able to find the camera for the fair! Maren got to ride her first "roller coaster" since she was too young and too short last year. To say that her face said "total and complete elation" would be an understatement. I don't know that I've ever seen such complete joy on a child's face. And she had her hands up in the air as much as she could without falling out of that silly dragon ride. Ha! It will forever play back in my mind at least. Thank you, Summer. You've been good to us. Now what are we going to do about this house?
1 comment:
Where's the BFF love? I'm glad your summer has been so fun. Did 800 people show up at your pavilion? Were you at the fair on Sat? we were. had a good time too. I LOVE summer!
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