Summer Time Fun

I love when summer finally comes. The weather is great, the kids are home, and Jared is off of work. This year is the first one in a long time that we don't really have much going on with Jared not having to constantly be working on his masters degree, so we are more free to do stuff.

Our plan this summer is to do something every day. Of coarse, the kids need to get their chores done first though, which includes, getting dressed, breakfast, brushing our hair, brushing our teeth, cleaning our rooms, cleaning the basement (toy room) and then reading for at least 30 minutes out loud to me. After that, we can go do stuff.

We have a really cool pond about a mile away from our house that is stocked full of fish and only kids are allowed to fish it, for free. It is so weird because every time we have gone there, we have never caught a fish, and yet the people next to us are reeling the fish in left and right. We checked to see what they were using and were surprised to learn that mini marsh mellows and corn attract the fish better than the usual worm or fly. Nevertheless, the kids still enjoy casting their reels and watching their bobs float back in.

Kenzie, Eli, and Alexis

I love this picture of Eli just as he is about to cast his fishing line.

It was a really warm night one night and Jared had left for mutual and so the kids and I were playing in the front yard. I taught the kids that you can throw tennis balls onto the roof and try and catch them as they roll down. Lexie wasn't interested so she when and played in the long grass (grain) by our house. Eventually I had all the kids sit in the grass so that I could take a picture.
Mackenzie, Jordyn, Alexis, and Eli

This was when we were playing with the tennis balls on the roof.

Alexis, before I made the other kids come sit with her. She would lie down and I wouldn't have been able to find her if I hadn't already known she was there.

I remember when I was a little girl, the lot across the street from our house was empty and filled with long grass and trees. I would go over there a lot and just lie down in the long grass and disappear. There was also this abandoned car that was flipped up-side-down that we would climb on, even though mom always told us not to go near the car, sometimes, our curiosity would get the better of us and we would "get near it".Great times were had in that long grass and "forest" area with the wrecked car. It still makes me kind of sad that someone eventually bought the land and put two houses there. No more fun, no more imagining.

(But also, no more dumping food across the street either! This is a different story, but my mom would always send us outside to dump food in the "forest" across the street. We didn't have a food grinder in our sink and foods that were too big to flush, got sent across the street. Dumping the food was embarrassing because people could see us haul bowls of yucky, moldy food from our house across the street and scrape it into the bushes. It would have been beneficial for us to actually build a compost pile in our backyard but that never happen. However, I would have rathered dump the food outside than down our toilet because we always had cheerios or other floaties that just wouldn't go down and it was embarrassing when friends came over and saw that.)