Summertime!

Bring on summertime!  I look forward to this time ALL year.  I love having my kids home.  We've on purpose not highly scheduled ourselves to allow us just to relax and play.  We love going on outings and since our annual membership to the Perot Museum was set to expire at the end of June we wanted to take advantage of it before we didn't have it.  We were able to get each person their own tablet to use for extra interactive activities within the museum.  That was really fun!

We also paid a bit extra to see a special exhibit that focused on various collections that people had.  Someone had collected Cowboys memorabilia, someone else had Beatles stuff.  But our favorite collection by far was that of the PEZ dispensers.  They were SO popluar with our kids that I caved and let them go into the souvineer shop to see if they had any.  Sure enough they had 4 different emoji pez dispensers and each of them wanted a different one and it just worked out.  So I became mom of the century!

One of our favorite places to go in the museum is the floor with the robots and electronics.  This floor is normally overrun with kids (who have limited supervision) and it's nearly impossible to do anything.  But on this day we went there FIRST and got to do many of the things we enjoy.  Here is a pizza that Kaitlyn designed that lit up on this fun exhibit!

After spending the morning at the Perot, we did another one of our favorite things, we met up with some of Matthew's special friends from preschool.  These kids have still remained buddies ever since their small close little pre-school group.  We went swimming!  

Stephen has been "Mr. Fix-It" lately right?  Well he was very spent with coming home each night with another thing to fix that the kids had broken.  He left one particular morning with the express request that we not break anything that day that requires his help.  Wouldn't you know that Matthew, who is stronger than he realizes and is ALWAYS breaking something, went up to get dressed.....and this happened! Oops!  My house may not survive the summer!

Matthew is having a very eventful summer already too--that evening he lost another tooth!  And one of his best preschool buddies he'd just seen that day ALSO lost the same tooth.  AND he's been begging me to learn to play the piano so I've agreed to teach him a bit myself and see if his interest holds.  He's probably the only kid I don't have to remind or ask to practice.  Guess who will be joining the ranks of piano players in the fall?  So proud of his enthusiasm!

One thing I'm really focusing on this summer with my kids is getting them to do service each week.  Last month Kaitlyn spearheaded a project for the Stake Day of Service to decorate lunch sacks for the homeless.  She had a few more sacks to decorate AND she wanted to drop them off in conjunction with serving a meal at the homeless shelter so we invited her friends from church to watch a movie and decorate more lunch sacks.  So proud of this girl!