State of the Family #39

 Once again, I lack in my blogging skills.  Lots of fun going on in this family over the last month. I had to go through my pictures to remember everything that we did.

Pouting about the noisy fireworks

Mr. Pyro and Miss Firecracker having fun iwth smoke balls

Of course it started off with lots and lots of activities for the 4th of July and we had fun gatherings with friends and had a good time at the activities in DeWitt.  There were inflatables, a parade, outhouse races, and awesome fireworks.  We had some of our college friends down one evening and had a great time catching up.  Miss Thumb Sucker was not impressed by fireworks and was quite comical to watch when they were going off around her.  Noisy Man is a pyro like his father and will become quite dangerous in his preteen and teenage years. I am afraid. 

We had a fabulous trip to the Henry Doorly Zoo with Mommy's best friend and her adorable Daughter I.  The play day had been in the works for over 2 months and had to be rescheduled over 5 times before we finally made it.  It was worth the wait though, as all time with her is!  We even got to see them twice that week, since we got to celebrate I's 2nd birthday with her later that weekend.  What a treat!

T-ball season finished up the 2nd week of the month and I have to say I am a little bummed.  The games were a lot of fun and the kids always had so much fun with them.

Family vacation came smack in the middle of the month, but I'll post all our fun adventures from that on another post or this one will be 10 pages long!

Since vacation we have had fun swimming, watching daddy shoot skeet or trap or whatever they call it, out at the gun club and lots of fun park play dates.  We have also been having a great time enjoying all of our garden produce.  We have a pelethora of zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes!

Last week was our county fair.  Cousins C, L and R always come down for that week and it was like a whole other family vacation, but at home.  We went swimming with them, rode all the rides at the fair, went roller skating (which was a disaster) and went tubing.  Again, lots of late nights but well-behaved kids minus the roller skating fiasco.  I guess it is just pretty hard for tired 3 and 5-year-olds to roller skate.  They were too tired to try very hard so they just got frustrated and mad.  Miss Firecracker surprisingly did better than Noisy Man, especially attitude-wise.  There was a miscommunication in who was coming skating and we found out too late that there wouldn't be anyone to hang out on the side-lines with Miss Thumb Sucker.  We also found out we couldn't just skate around holding her, which was our back-up plan.  So she was miserable stuck sitting on the outside of all the fun with nothing to do, always wanting the parent that was out on the roller rink floor. 

All of the kids had a blast riding all the rides at the fair.  Daddy was a little more daring than mommy's comfort level with the rides he let them do, but mommy ended up being the worry wart, as they always got off every ride with huge smiles on their faces, asking to do it again.  It was so gosh darn hot that we really didn't get to fully enjoy the fair like we do most years.  We skimmed through the animals and such, but never even made it inside all the 4-H and vendor exhibits to check everything out.  Mommy was pretty bummed by this as these are usually her favorite parts of the fair.  Mommy and the kids snuck out one morning while the daddy's were golfing and looked at the rest of the animals and watched a bit of the horse show, but the exhibit places weren't open yet.

This is the caterpillar that Noisy Man caught on one of our green bean plants in the garden.  Just 2 days after its captivity it made a chrysalis in his bug cage and came out, of course, a beautiful butterfly.  Daddy said it was a black monarch.  This is the pic we got just before we let it go.  It was quite the summer science lesson as we got lots of books from the library on caterpillars and butterflies.

Now we are to the end of July already and it is only 3 weeks before Noisy Man starts his first day of Kindergarten.  I am not sure I am ready for that, minus the fact that I can go grocery shopping with only one child instead of three. 

Noisy Man had been begging to do a lemonade stand for quite some time. 
Finally, we had time to get it done.  He made $7, just enough to mail a
 shoebox for Operation Christmas Child!