and some other summer adventures
Hot Days:
So it got really hot here for a few days. Our thermometer read 120 degrees but I think it was closer to 115.
One of the hot days we went bowling with the cousins.
It was lots of fun to see them
Other days we just stayed home and got in the kiddie pool a little
Our house stayed cool - our AC kept working but it was amazingly hot outside
The kids were ok being outside in the pool
The heat scorched some of our plants - lots of plants around the area are kind of burned now.
Poor scorched raspberries
Our grapes are struggling just to get started. The wild bunnies that visit our yard have been eating them.
This was our grapes after the hot days.
And here they are a few weeks later. Getting a little bigger.
This is what's growing on our trellis. Not sure what it is but it provides some nice privacy between yards.
Here are a few other plants - tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and strawberries
I have two larger tomato plants and one cherry tomato. One big tomato plant is struggling a bit.
Our little pumpkin patch
Some of our first pumpkins
We've had lots of blossoms but not as many pumpkins yet. Many bees are hanging around so we'll see what happens.
A few new flowers I have planted. The shasta daisies seem a little sad, but the echinacea are doing well.
We planted one zucchini plant among the pumpkins and it is producing pretty well. We have cooked up lots of zucchini over the past few days. We are trying to decide if the one plant will produce more zucchini than we want. We shall see.
4th of July:
Our 4th of July was pretty low key. We went to my sister's ward to see their new baby get blessed in the morning and we BBQed at home in the afternoon. We had DIY red white and blue skewers and hot dogs, hamburgers and watermelon.
And a water balloon fight
No one got (very) sad so I count that as a success
The River:
Just down the hill from our house - about a 1/2 mile walk - is a nice swimming spot on the Washougal river - a tributary of the Columbia. We have had some fun swimming there this summer.
Floaties are pretty fun on the river - its pretty slow moving here but you do need to be careful not to get swept downstream. Scott told me all the kids would need water shoes, and he was right, its pretty rocky in the water.
After a while the kids like to abandon the floaties and just swim around.
Another day we went to different spot on the river and waded and skipped rocks.
Other Summer Activities:
Matthew got to go to a youth conference with church at Lake Cle Elum. It was just our ward so Matthew was able to become better friends with some of the boys in the ward. It was a 3 day trip and they had lots of fun, or so I hear.
We're enjoying the long days and mostly lovely weather. The kids are having fun playing on the swing set.
Emma did basketball camp one week. She had fun and made some friends. Anna had biotech camp and the three younger kids did Lego coding camp the first week after school got out. Next week John is doing an eco-camp. We are staying pretty busy.
We're doing swimming lessons right now. Matthew and Anna's class requires swim caps and goggles, which Anna wasn't too happy about. They are working on swim stroke techniques and doing lots of long laps across the pool. Grant and John are in a class together and working on some basic swimming. Emma's class is at the "put your face in the water" phase and she's not too thrilled about that. So I guess we have a little ways to go there.
The lessons are half an hour and Matthew and Anna go after the younger kids. We've all been reading books while we wait. Here Grant is reading Fablehaven #1, John is reading Captain Underpants #2 and Emma is reading Unicorn Diaries #?. Anna is reading Robinson Crusoe and Matthew read Jurassic Park, The Martian Chronicles and started on To Kill a Mockingbird all within the first swim week. I have brought Emma (the book) to re-read most days but end up watching the kids swim instead.
Grant is always working on different Lego creations.
This day he was making different background pictures.
Emma, as is her custom, requires nearly constant attention. She has been telling me she's bored quite a bit this summer. I got lots of crafts for her to work on but have limited her to one craft a day. Gotta make it last all summer. So she wakes up early in the morning, does her allotted craft and then follows me around most of the day. On this day we made cookies at her request.
Anna has been making these beautiful friendship bracelets and also working on some other craft and sewing projects.
We found a whole bunch of these stripy caterpillars behind our house. The internet says they might be Cinnabar moths.
We have ventured out to some parks, which we haven't done that much. A lot of playing on our own street and in our own yard but not too much going to the park. We have walked to a little park near our house a few times and on this day John and Emma and I went to a park on the other side of Camas. Lots of fun.
I had planned to do some organizing - specifically the garage - but haven't had time yet. We did go through all the boys clothes on this day. Before I could get some of the winter clothes put into a bin, John and Grant had to play clothes monster with them. They borrowed my phone to take these pictures, which I didn't know about until later. The clothes remained sorted at least.
Playing a dragon game one evening.
I was so excited to find beautiful rhubarb at the grocery store and we made strawberry rhubarb crisp. This first attempt, we decided, didn't have enough rhubarb filling in it, so we will make another attempt another time. It was still pretty good.
Anna wanted to make dinner one night. Matthew has a Dungeons and Dragons inspired cookbook and Anna made a recipe from it, Miner's Pie (a lot like shepherd's pie). It was very tasty! She made some rustic biscuits to go along with it. I guess this was all supposed to be dwarf food. We recently read the Hobbit (or I read it to the kids) and had been watching all the Hobbit movies, so dwarf food seemed appropriate.
Before the Hobbit trilogy we had watched all the Marvel movies in the order they would have taken place. It took us about six months, watching one a week. I'm happy to be done with that. I am glad I've seen them now and I'm a lot less confused now (before I had seen a handful of them). I am a bit of a sensitive movie watcher - I don't take violence very well in movies or TV shows. I don't watch scary movies at all because its so hard on my mental health. I did have a little nervous breakdown after watching Infinity War and Endgame. Grant also cried a bit after those movies and I felt bad I had let my 10 year old watch something that I could barely handle. But we talked about it and I think we're all ok.
So I am thoroughly burned out on "dude movies" now (or movies with gratuitous explosion/fight scenes) and the Hobbit movies didn't help. So now I just want to watch the Muppets or Jane Austen type movies for the rest of the year. No one else is on board with this plan except Anna.
BTW my favorite Marvel movies are Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2 and Ant Man 1 and 2. These are ones I will willingly watch again, but maybe not for a while.
