After school got out, John, Emma and I practiced riding bikes a lot without training wheels. Some progress was made over the summer but neither of them is riding confidently yet without help. We'll keep trying.
John could ride a little here and there without help.
I set Grant up with Tinker CAD for the summer - a kid version of CAD (an engineering drawing program). Grant loves drawing houses and cities and things on graph paper and making graph paper plans for Minecraft or Legos. I thought he might like to draw them on Tinker CAD which has setting to draw and create in both Lego blocks and Minecraft blocks. He played around with it a little over the summer, but not that much.
Going on a little hike with the younger kids. Part of the boardwalk on this hike was still flooded from all the spring rains.
We had fun hiking.
I got together with my sister and her kids to celebrate my mom's birthday. The kids played in the river while we hung out.
Cousin sand castle
Water time
John trying to float away in the river
Here is Anna coming back from Girl's Camp. They went to a church owned camp near Olympia and had a great time. They played paintball on the last day.
The younger kids had a lot of fun playing in our little pool in the yard.
How many floaties can we fit in there?
One day we went to the Ape Caves near Mt. St. Helens.
Here we are before going inside.
At the cave entrance. There is a longer, more difficult route you can take that involves a lot of scrambling over large rocks or a shorter easier path that is just walking along an easy tunnel path. We started out on the harder path but some of our smaller people got nervous in a hurry so we turned around and did the easy path. Maybe when kids are older we can tackle the hard way.
In the cave! It was fun.
We also went to a nearby site called a Trail of Two Forests recommended by my brother-in-law. It was really cool and we were able to see a lot of tree casts - formed when lava flowed around some trees. You can even climb through one of the tree casts.
Looking down into a tree cast
You can climb through this horizontal tree cast (maybe 40 feet long) - an underground stone tunnel the shape of a tree. The kids fit through pretty easily and Scott and I planned to climb through it. It's a tight fit and I freaked out and didn't want to climb through. Scott made it through. It was cool but also the stuff of claustrophobic nightmares. Here is John emerging unscathed and unafraid. Good job, John!
A few more pics from Trail of Two Forests
A claw arm Emma built with a kit
There was a peanut butter recall on Jif at the end of the school year and we had to buy Skippy. Which would be fine except our very picky 7 year old eats hardly any food and subsists on PB&J, shredded cheese and Ramen...somehow she lives. Anyway, she is convinced that she can taste the difference between Jif and Skippy. And she doesn't like Skippy. So Emma was happy when we started seeing Jif at the store again.
And here are a couple pics of Matthew on his high adventure trip with church. His church friends weren't going so he had to hang out with the younger boys but I think he still had fun.
Matthew is 2nd from the right here.
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