Summer Fun, Part 1

 We are more than halfway through summer, so I thought I would share a little bit about what we've been up to.

The kids have all spent some time reading. For the most part, they have been rereading old favorites.

Ellie has been on a swim team since Covid, but Hannah stopped during the past school year. For the summer, I signed up Hannah, and they've been going with our neighbor Chloe.

Hannah loves having lazy mornings where she sleeps in and then reads in bed for a while. As you can see, the kittens love it as well.

The boys were at a water polo tournament (Joey did club water polo this summer with his old Double Peak friends) so the girls and I took advantage of our girls' day and went to a restaurant that the boys don't like.

Celebrating our favorite dad on Father's Day. 

Our other two favorite dads were out of town that day, so Andy got the whole day to himself.

Ellie has randomly gotten into a Starbucks kick lately, which is funny since Andy and I don't even like coffee. She always gets caramel frappuccinos. For her birthday, the gift she wanted from us was a Starbucks gift card. She usually likes to walk down to the Starbucks near our house, but this time she grabbed a drink while we were shopping at Target.

Andy and I celebrated 20 years of marriage this June! 

We had all sorts of plans to celebrate our big anniversary, but they fell through. Honestly, I was very happy just going out to dinner with this great guy!

A FroYo Love date with our 91-year old friend Louise.

One of our new favorite summer treats is making meringues. 

We serve them with vanilla ice cream and a mixed berry sauce. SO good!

Hannah has lots of fun, relaxing activities that she especially likes to do during the summer when she has plenty of time...

Abigail, Hannah and Ellie all made this salted caramel chocolate cake. It turned out so well!

I got a new desk as an early birthday present. All of the money spent on Joey's Lego sets over the years paid off. He basically built the whole thing!

Andy's parents got back into town at the beginning of July. Andy and I took them out to dinner for his mom's belated birthday and a belated Father's Day.

Joey has been doing some "knees over toes" exercises this summer to strengthen his legs for basketball. Ellie sometimes helps him out.

Somehow the kids always end up reading our old blog books during the summer. They always enjoy reading stories from their childhood.