Happy Father's Day!

Can you tell how excited he was to get his very own tractor sprinkler?!

 One son was not being so cooperative.

We enjoyed the priest baseball game with Grandpa Mike.  It was hot, but not as bad as I thought it would be!

We love you Jeremy!  Thanks for taking such good care of us!

Properly Prepared

It is important to have eye and foot protection when doing battle with your brother.

Yum!

I'm looking forward to making these fun edible tea cups at my Tea Party class!

Philip was enjoying his time with Grandma Susan and Grandpa Mike!

Camp OK

Every year the local Kiwanis club sponsors a few kids to go to their leadership camp.  Samuel got to go this year!  All of the 100 kids were sponsored by some area club.  It sounds like they did tons of fun stuff.  Samuel took a few pictures but you'll have to ask him about them, I don't remember the details.  I also grabbed a few off the camp's FB page.

What's with dabbing?  I guess I'm not up on pop culture....

 They did a service project in a nearby town and then got to ride the town's passenger train line.

The camp was kind of far away.  The kids from around here rode a charter bus to and from camp there were three places you could get on.

 He was in the Black Hawk cabin.

They swam, canoed, rode horses, did some community service, climbed a big rock wall, had campfires and generally did tons of summer camp things!  We're so grateful he was given the opportunity to go!

Failed Family Adventure

So we planned a family fun day for this Monday.  Walk across the pedestrian bridge in the morning, history museum in the afternoon.  Half an hour from our house we realized we hadn't brought the family pass to the museum that we bought at a silent auction.  We were too far to turn back for the pass and there was no way we were going to go pay to go to a museum we had passes for at home.  So we headed to the bridge as planned, missed the exit and ended up on the opposite side of the bridge than we planned.  That wasn't so bad because the side we parked on has nothing to do but the opposite side does so we walked across, went through the museum, played a little in the spray park and walked back to the van.  We successfully ate lunch at a special restaurant where kids eat free on Mondays. Score. (kidseatfree.com don't go on an adventure without checking there first.)  Then with 95 degree weather and no real afternoon plan we tried to figure out what to do.  We started a walk around a nearby lake with a really cool fountain.  Half way around, no where near any bathrooms two kids had tummy problems.  I'll spare you the icky details (and any kid embarrassment) but we gave up and went home after that.  We enjoyed a movie and ice cream sundaes at home so not all was lost but we'll have to try again on the Family fun day.

Here's Julia jumping off he same dolphin sculpture in 2011 and 2016. And if you look at thecollage you can see Nicholas jumping off it very similarly to Julia in 2011 too.  :)

What Nicholas has been up to

He and I walked out to the drainage ditch while the bigs were at vacation Bible school.

 I was impressed with this coloring he did during rest time.

 and he's loving the big sand pile.

Cool Points Regained

Temporarily at least.

 When Nicholas saw it he said, "Oh!  Sand for my digger!"

We have a dump truck load of sand to play in.  It's for a drainage project Jeremy is working on and for under some pavers we're going to add to our patio but until those projects are done the huge pile is fair game.  There will be some left over to play but they'd better take advantage of the huge pile now.

Here's the drainage project.

Next we'll put down landscaping fabric and rocks from this pile:

Fun for climbing too!

Pool Time!

It was definitely hot enough for the pool this week!

Here's our annual headed to the pool picture, please excuse the farmer tans.