Our First Week of Summer

There is something to be said about the power of a memory-or in my case, the lack thereof.  It's only Monday, and here I have been thinking back over our first week of summer and not having the greatest memory of the fun that we created together.  Then, as I sat and began to go through pictures, a smile crept over my face as I began to remember that we did indeed create some fun memories together. 

I don't have pictures of all of it-in fact, I don't have pictures of most of it.  But it's all there, in our hearts.  We are very fortunate to live just a hop, skip and a jump from our local library, so for our Library & Treat day, we headed on down the road to check out a few books.  Our library also checks out board games and we got a few of those too.  We've had the most fun with the games (Scrabble and one other I can't remember the name of and the boys mostly used the square blocks from it to build castles with).  Our library also does a summer reading program that starts this week, where you can earn prizes for reading during the summer.  That is on the docket for this week. 
Our science project was a bit of a flop, but we had fun with it anyway.  He strung a thread across our house and then attached a small piece of a straw to an inflated balloon and strung the balloon onto the thread.  The idea was that when we let the end of the balloon go, it would zip down the thread and we would have balloon races.  Well, it only "zipped" the first time we tried it.  From then on, no zipping.  After a bit of trying, we gave up and just had fun blowing up our balloons and letting them go.  I also taught my kids how to make a balloon "scream" by pulling the sides of the opening apart.  That has been fun!  (Dave has long since regretted my decision to teach them this little trick.)  I wish I had pictures of it all, but Greyson and I started to get sick that day, and we ended up making a visit to the doctor, so it really was all we could do just to do an activity.  Taking pictures would have pushed me over the edge. :)

But, I did get pictures of our field trip on Friday.  We went bowling!  Toward the end of the year, Chad brought a postcard home from school about FREE bowling for every kid, every day of the whole summer.  Well, obviously, we aren't going to go that often, but Chad picked it for our first field trip, and it was so fun.  The link to sign up for free is HERE.  You do have to pay for shoes, but it is still very reasonable. 

This little thing they are standing at was pretty cool.  It looked like a little dinosaur slide, and it was, but a ball slide.  All we had to do was line it up in the middle of the alley and put the ball at the top, and it would roll that ball right down the center.  Greyson had so much fun bowling, thanks to this thing! 

 

Chad found that he did better without it and he bowled a 91 all on his own!  I thought that was pretty good for being 7.  He had 3 spares that game.  

And this little lady was quite a trooper.  She was happy the whole time, and fell asleep in her car seat right as we were getting ready to pack up.  There weren't many people our bowling, which was nice, and this happens to be the same bowling alley we always go to on New Years Eve with my family, so that was extra fun for my kids to be there and remember all the years we've gone for that event. 

Well, we're already getting a good start to our new week, and I better get this finished up and be present in the moment, because if this summer is like any of our others, it will be gone.  Fast.