School starts tomorrow and there's still so much I haven't yet documented from this summer. It flew by way too fast! To think I was worried at the beginning of the summer about having enough to keep us busy. It has truly been a whirlwind summer - one that I'm still trying to catch up from! To save on time (something I seem to be running out of lately), I figured I'd just clump a bunch of my summer pictures into one big post. Here goes. . .
I kept the girls on a pretty strict summer study to keep their mornings busy. It worked like a charm at the beginning of the summer, then kinda died off come August - after all our travels. These little charts are definite keepers though. My girls were reading, writing, exercising, doing math, jobs and a service every single day!
The library is always one of our favorite places to be when we have nothing else going on. We have a basket full of library books that we read and exchange once a week. This summer the girls got into The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew. Calvin's currently obsessed with nursery rhymes and Dr. Suess. It was a train book he got super excited about in the pic below.
They all joined the library reading club the first week of summer and picked up prizes each week. One of the 15 hour prizes was a free Round Table personal pizza! So we went ahead and made it a family date night!
Of course the beach was a regular weekly outing. Every Wednesday the moms in our ward head to Carpinteria for the day. Each week we'll have a group of anywhere from 20-50 kids. It's pretty amazing! The ones with older kids stay til sunset, but my crew can't last that long yet. We always have so much fun though and look forward to it every week. There really is something so magical about the beach. We all went to Carp yesterday for one last time beach trip of the summer and had the biggest group yet. I'll have to add those pics to this post later.
Sailing to the islands is always a summer must!
We had to hit up the splash pad at least once:
Lots of patriotic celebrating went undocumented . . . I organized and directed a choir of 14 primary aged kids. They preformed at Leisure Village's Patriotic celebration on July 3rd. It was quite the production and we've been asked to come back for their Christmas Program. We'll see what I can get out together.
I just love anything that gives Madi a chance to perform in front of people. She gets pretty excited about it too! Elle dropped out of the choir by choice - it's not her thing.
We've had lots and lots of cousin time this summer!! What a treat it is to have the Terry family living here now. In my opinion, the cousin relationship is right up their with siblings. Having all sorts of cousins to play with has really made it an especially magical summer for my kids.
Celebrating birthdays with Boppi and Grandpa Al and cousins:
Speaking of cousins, Spencer's cousin and family came to stay with us the day after we got home from WY. Bummed we never got a picture with them visiting (it ended up being a super busy week for us), but Grandpa Al and Boppi hosted a huge waffle breakfast the Saturday morning they were here. Nothing beats a cool summer morning eating breakfast out in the gazebo - especially when your waffles look like this:
And It's fun getting to go out with this bunch and having older kids who can baby-sit all the kids!
What an amazing summer it's been - so many wonderful memories made!
The 2014 school year can now begin!!
