We lived it up this summer! We tried to make the very most of the sunny, unscheduled days. The school year runs on such a tight schedule, with 3 kids, their activities, schoolwork, etc. that we love to soak in the lazy days of summer as much as we can. Here are our highlights of June/July/August 2014!
In mid-June, we celebrated Father's Day with Grammy and Grandpa Brown by spending the morning outdoors at the Morton Arboretum. It's always so pretty and fun there! We waded in the shallow pond and caught a few tadpoles. Tyler held one for the first time (and nearly squished the poor thing).
We also gave Erik a fun present for Father's Day. Our local newspaper held a photo contest to show great dads in action. We submitted one of our favorite photos of Erik, taken a few years back before Tyler had arrived. In it, the kids had asked Erik to play superheroes, so they all got into costume and did their best pose. We sent it to the paper, and it was one of the few they selected for printing. We cut it out before Erik had a chance to see it and put it in a frame, wrapped it up and gave it to him! We are so grateful to have Erik (and 2 fantastic grandpas, too) in our lives!
Next up was Cassidy's 7th birthday! Since we had a trip to Florida coming up over her birthday, we celebrated a bit early with Grammy and Grandpa Brown. Cassidy had so much fun creating birthday fairy gardens with Grammy! It's become a bit of a tradition since these two share a special love of gardening and fairies. This year's basket even had real lights!
(Cassidy's June 28 birthday celebration will be captured in a separate post about our fun FL trip!)
Also, just a couple weeks after her birthday, Cassidy had a "sleep-under" party with a few of her close friends. A sleep-under is a party that has all (or most!) of the fun of a sleep-over, but the kids all head home just before bedtime. So, all the girls arrived in PJs and brought their pillows, we had a pizza dinner and cake for dessert, we decorated pillow cases, then we spread out in the living room to watch a movie as nighttime rolled in. We had SO much fun and we can't believe Cassie is 7!
Mid-summer, we took a fun day trip up to the Vlach's house near Milwaukee. This was actually a good-bye visit, as the Vlachs have since made an international move to Luxembourg! Rob's job is taking them abroad for a few years, and we really hope to visit them at some point! For now, we keep up through their blog and social media. We really miss seeing our great friends! But we are so glad that we had those few years living so close to one another, as our kids got to become really great friends.
We took a few fun trips to Wagner Farm this summer. The kids especially love to feed grass to the chickens and sit on the tractors. And - if the ice cream parlor is open, we always grab a scoop!
Chicago's Shedd Aquarium is one of our favorite family destinations. We go a number of times each year and always have a really fun time. During this last visit, the kids listened to a shark talk in the Wild Reef section. Our kids dream of being marine biologists someday (especially Cassidy). Seeing Chicago's pretty skyline is an added bonus!
Gillson Beach was another hot spot for us this summer. We spent many mornings there playing in the sand, hanging out with friends, and even playing in the chilly water (not me, just the kids! Brrrr!). We discovered a small section of beach just north of the main beach that was hardly ever crowded - in fact we often had it to ourselves. It made for some really peaceful summer days.
One of the highlights of our summer was the visit we got from the Burkholders! My sister and her family of 5 drove up from KY to spend a weekend with us. Our kids absolutely love to visit with their cousins! We kept ourselves busy, spending time at the beach, the pool and Chicago's Botanic Garden. We are so thankful they made the trip here and we have such great memories from our weekend together! We took lots of group photos...
It's always a little sad for me to see summer come to an end. But luckily we have lots of fun things to look forward to in the fall and plenty more memories to make along the way.
