STATTON SUMMER SUMMARY

So, I've decided that blogging 3 or 4 times a year is much more efficient than once or twice a week. This has totally been my plan all along...of course. You can go ahead and set a reminder for somewhere around January 15th for my next post. Cause, you know, December's busy and all.

This is going to be a summary of our summer (just in case you missed the title of the post). Mainly not to brag or post pictures for family, but so when my kids complain that we never do anything I can yell at them "look! Look at this blog and see what all we did this summer!" Can't argue with the blog, right? Of course they will then pull the one thing off our Summer Bucket List that we didn't do as retaliation.

"But Mom, we never made homemade Ice chalk and that's the only thing I wanted to do!"

"Oh really? Then why did I take you to 3 Vacation Bible schools?!" (really, that was for me but it will be years before they figure that out)

Our first summer activity wasn't actually quite summer yet, it was in May during school because lets face it, I couldn't wait any longer to take a beach vacation. (I'm thinking of planning our 2014 vacation for next month) So here we are in all our squinty eyed, white dress beautifulness on the beach.

 We went to the lake with friends and family - Kaleigh even learned to water ski!! She stayed up for more than 20 seconds. Okay, that sounds like a joke but really 20 seconds is a pretty long time for a newbie water skiier...We were very proud!

We frequented our new local splash pad. It was a lot of fun. And best of all with a splash pad you don't have to worry so much about E.coli, meningitis and other joys of public swimming pools.

Kaleigh got to go to Family Farm. It is a wonderful place and I highly recommend it to those in the area. They learned bible verses, rode horses, went fishing and canoeing, rode paddle boats, built sand castles, played with the farm animals, did archery, and more! I think Nathan was most proud when she told us about her bulls-eye in archery. Here she is with all her awards... 

Visited our family in Louisiana and went to a children's museum...

My picture taking dropped off immensely at some point in the summer. Pretty much after our beach trip in May. Here's the other stuff we did that I didn't get pictures of: 

• made sun catchers
• mall
• Magic Springs (Kaleigh & Emory with my sister)
• Vacation Bible School 
• Swimming in friends pool and the lake
• picked strawberries
• visited family
• camping
• $1 Summer movies
• K learned to ride her bike 

The 3 older girls took swim lessons. We did our library summer reading and all five of us girls completed our goals. We took part in many of their programs, which are great! And K ready probably 50 chapter books this summer. I wish I had kept count. She read a ton! I can't say how happy that makes me.

We planted a garden. I approximate that I spent about 50 dollars and 17 hours and we got maybe 10 edible tomatoes, 10 cucumbers, lots of basil, some other herbs, a few squash. All in all, a rousing success. (you can't discount the satisfaction of eating your own home grown food, even if six people are sharing a 3-inch cucumber.

Well, that was our summer in a nutshell. I'm happy with it. So what if I intended to teach the twins to read and only made it through 8 lessons? Or that i wanted to read one book of the bible to my kids and we got through about 4 chapters? Or that my garden fed more bugs, worms and rabbits than it did us? We survived the summer, relationships intact. Most importantly, I got lots of ammo to fire at my kids thru at least the end of the year when they tell me they never get to do anything.