Night swimming in the lake after a birthday party.
Graydon and Curtis participated in a basketball camp. At the end of the week, Graydon won two contests: Free Throw and Knockout. He's really growing in his basketball skills!
Our youth group hosted a breakfast for a jeep ride fundraiser that was coming through town. (And now Andy wants a Jeep).
A backyard game of Monopoly.
Bella won. She was ruthless. Curtis and I weren't pleased. :)
It's amazing the places this cat can fall asleep.
Bella wanted to camp out in the backyard. I camped with her one night and Andy and the boys camped out another night. We could have all fit in there if we didn't fill it with our queen-sized blow up mattress. But I was definitely thankful for that mattress! In the middle of the night, I was awoken to Salty trying to barge through the tent walls and later I saw his silhouette as he tried to climb up the tent. Probably around 1:30am, I got out and locked him in the garage. Otherwise I wasn't going to get any sleep!
On one of Andy's days off, we made it a family fun day and spent the day at Urban Air.
Curtis took a secret selfie with my phone - always a fun surprise for me to find. Look at that cute smile!
More Monopoly! They spent hours playing together one afternoon.
Do you remember the Face App that was so popular a few weeks ago? Here is how they think Graydon will look as an old man.
And an only slightly older man.
Yikes!
Curtis's is a little harder to tell, but they did give him some wrinkles.
Bella snapped this one of us after drying off at the end of a long afternoon at the pool. It must have been a hot day since I got in with them.
Another Face App victim. I'm a little nervous that I might be looking at my future right here!
Bella and her curly, wispy baby hairs.
The boys and I went up to WI for my sister's bachelorette/shower weekend. The first part of the bachelorette party was a ropes course. I had never done one before and this was likely the hottest weekend of the summer. I don't think I had ever sweat so much in my life! But the courses were a great challenge and a great time. Here were are before all of the sweating began. We even had jewels on our face (at the beginning before we sweat them off!)
Meanwhile, the boys and their cousins were having a day of fun with Grandma Debbie. She took them to see the new Lion King movie (and bought them Lion King gear that the theater was selling). Then they went bowling and to Barnes and Noble. I think I'm forgetting something else that they did. The boys really enjoyed their Grandma/cousin time.
Curtis strikes again with my phone!
We went to my brother's house to hang out with him a little and see his dogs. They are Mabel's relatives and it felt like two little Mabels greeting us!
Later that afternoon was Kristen's bridal shower. Here are the lovely greeters for the shower. It was held in my Grandma's backyard and they helped direct everyone where to go.
I'm not sure exactly what is going on here, but I feel like this is one of those photos that would be funny to recreate someday.
Graydon was also in charge of the "Message in a Bottle" stations. (The shower had a nautical theme). While standing there, he must have written his own message because Kristen texted this to me that evening. He was a little confused on his details, but overall I thought it was really sweet.
Bella didn't come up with us because she and Andy went to church camp. Between these two photos is all the people who went from Hope. Some are pictured twice.
There's always a theme party night at camp and this year's theme was Dr. Seuss. Andy wore our Cat in the Hat hat and Bella went as Daisy Head Mayzie.
While Bella and Andy were at camp, the boys and I had some good times together. Even though I thought my Chuck E. Cheese days were over, they wanted to go there for lunch one day. They have swipe cards now instead of tokens, which I really liked. You choose an amount of time and then it's all-you-can-play until the time runs out. They both won a lot of tickets!
They combined their winnings and got this blow-up guitar. It cost 800 tickets. They also got some candy. After we left, they kept finding tickets that were hidden in their pockets. I think they had at least another 40 that they could have spent. Whoops!
Graydon went to a sleepover at a friend's house, so Curtis and I had some one-on-one time. We went to his favorite place: Wendy's! A chocolate frosty for each of us.
We also checked out a putt putt course near our pediatrician's office.
One afternoon, they wanted to go to the school track. They didn't intentionally dress alike, but when they took off their shirts, it sure looked that way.
We spent a lot of time at the pool. Here they are playing some crazy game.
Graydon has been taking on extra chores lately. He bought himself a PS4 and was short $42. We covered that cost for him, so he's got to do extra help to pay off his debt to us. He made 50 cents by bringing our garbage bin back up to the house. I cringed when I saw that he did it barefoot!
The front porch is one of my favorite places to hang out in the summer.
More pool time! They worked hard to get this pose down right.
But there was a lot of this before they accomplished that.
And more porch time.
Andy and Bella returned from camp on a Saturday. Andy was home for Sunday and then he and the boys (and some other kids from church) left for another week of camp on Monday.
We had more kids than could fit in the church van, so I drove some of them up. A bonus to doing so was that I got to see the boys all settled into their cabins.
For several weeks, Bella and I had been making plans about what we could do the week that the boys were gone. The afternoon that I got back from bringing kids to camp, we went to see the new Aladdin movie. Both of us liked it and I was surprised that Bella knew so many of the words to the songs.
On Tuesday, we drove up to Indianapolis to eat at the Cake Bake Shop. This is a high-end bakery that we've been wanting to check out for several months.
Good thing we decided to split our meal and dessert. These were pretty big portions.
This cake was called the Millionaire cake and it was SO delicious! Oh my goodness. . . I don't think I've ever had such a good-tasting piece of cake before. But again, I'm so glad that we split it.
On our way back home, we stopped at Barnes & Noble, read some books and drank some iced coffee.
The following day we went on a hike through Clifty Falls State Park. This is the same place that Bella went hiking earlier in the summer with a teacher and friends. She enjoyed it so much that she wanted to go back.
This is called Cake Rock, for obvious reasons.
Some of the trails were pretty rugged.
We came prepared for this cave with flashlights. It's technically a tunnel because it comes out at another end; whereas a cave only has one opening. But it was a few hundred feet of damp darkness that curved and you couldn't see the way out, so it felt very cave-like. At one point, we turned off our flashlights and it was completely black. I thought it was so neat. And it was also about twenty degrees cooler in there, so that felt really nice after getting pretty hot and sweaty on our hike.
In the tunnel - looking back from where we came.
We wouldn't have been able to make it through without flashlights.
We made it out!
Meanwhile, Andy texted me a few pictures of the boys at camp. These were nice to see - especially to see Curtis smiling since he was feeling really homesick the previous day.
Eckridge Hotdogs - Graydon's favorite. I guess he ate five that night!
While the boys were gone, Papa and Gaga stopped in for the night on their way back from a Boy Scout event in West Virginia. Gaga is getting an app lesson from Bella.
After setting up my school office one evening, I saw a really pretty sunset as I walked to the van. I'm not sure why I try to take photos of sunsets because the pictures never look as good as real life. But it was a really pretty sky.
And one more Face App casualty. Bella had her hair up in her original photo, so it thought she was a male and gave her aged photo facial hair! Oh Bella.
Like I said earlier, tomorrow is our last day of summer vacation with school starting on Tuesday. When the kids were younger, I used to make summer bucket lists to help beat summer boredom and to make sure that we did all of the things that make summer summer. I haven't done an official bucket list in a few years, mostly because our summers are shorter and busier than they were in those days when the kids were littler. But I do like to keep track of the fun things we did just to see how we spent the summer of 2019. Here is what we did this summer, some of these things multiple times. . .
- play at the park
- go out for ice cream
- go swimming
- eat watermelon
- spontaneous dance parties
- play basketball
- road trips
- swim in the ocean
- 4-H projects
- county fair
- Urban Air
- metal detecting
- kite flying
- making homemade limeade
- swim in a lake
- backyard swinging
- boat ride
- backyard party
- VBS
- fireworks
- sleepover with cousins
- bounce house
- mini golfing
- climbing to the top of a lighthouse
- sleepovers with friends
- night swimming
- basketball camp (the boys)
- ice cream from an ice truck
- backyard camping
- star gazing
- looking for shapes in the clouds
- resting in the hammock
- Chuck E. Cheese (the boys)
- eat corn on the cob
- board games
- rollerblading and skateboarding (the boys)
- Cake Bake Shop (Bella)
- go to the movies
- hiking at Clifty Falls State Park (Bella)
- church camp
- rock painting
