August | 2011 | our_domestic_church's Xanga Site

This summer has been very busy and I've been extremely quiet here. I'm not sure what has been so busy other than normal day to day life, but I found it very hard to sit down and write or even post pictures. I've thought several tims about sitting down and doing a "summer in installments" type of thing, where I write about our summer and post pictures in segments, updating here with all we've done, but that seems to daunting to me and I don't think I'll get it done.

So now that summer is coming to a close and school is starting again, I'm hoping life may slow down...some what. My school days are busy, but life in the fall and winter seem to take on a routine and sense of quiet and calmness that summer doesn't allow for. We've got our new schedule in place and we're slowly moving our morning wake-up time earlier and earlier, hoping to finally reach that final goal of 6am. I huge challenge for me, since I really don't like getting up early, but there is too much to cram into every day without making the sacrifice.

We started school slowly this year, starting with half days a couple weeks ago, working our way slowly (still) to full days. Today we took time to enjoy Mamma's last real day home before heading back to school herself and the beautiful sunny day. So after lunch we packed into the van, picked up a small treat and headed to the park in town to play at the playground for awhile. Augustin always asks me to stop at a playground, but I always say "No" because we have so many things to play with at the house, but the sun was shining, the breeze was blowing and it was perfect.

Some of the boys enjoying lunch outside

Grant and Veronica enjoying a snack

We checked out the river to see how high the water was after the tropical storm this weekend. It was really flowing.

After throwing some sticks into the river we headed for the playground. We were the only people there for most of the time and the kids had fun running all over.

Augustin running; he loves to move ALL THE TIME

Augustin and Samuel really liked these rocking animals

Matthias and Augustin

Grant, the big guy, sitting on top of the climbing structure

And now standing inside it. This gives some perspective of how tall he's gotten this summer. He's now just shy of 5ft 9.5 inches and is wearing a size 13 shoe

And there were also the money bars; he had a great time showing us how tall he was

While the boys played, Veronica enjoying sitting in the grass. She's been able to sit for awhile now, but prefers to be moving. This was the longest I've ever seen her sit still. She's 9 months old now and had a great check-up yesterday. She's 15lbs 14oz and 27" long.

She loved this leaf

Samuel was all over the place, running, climbing, sliding

He insisted on climbing this ladder...I"m almost ready

I'm ready, take my picture now

And take it again as I climb through here

And at the top of the slide

Samuel is a real ham for the camera

Parker was really enjoying running up the slide and then dramatically sliding down on his belly
Here's the warm up for the run

And then the slide down

Grant got in on the action and chased Parker up the slide a few times

And another run, climb, slide

Ok, she as just too cute sitting in the grass, so I had to keep taking pictures of her. She doesn't normally sit still for this long and I was enjoying capturing some smiles without having the chase her around

Matthias had been off on his own swinging, but finally came over to check out the rocking toys

And then give me a nice big smile

As was said before, Augustin LOVES TO MOVE ALL THE TIME. I don't think he stopped moving the entire hour we were there.

They finally discovered the swings and they had a lot of fun there. Matthias had discovered them very early on and was happy when the other boys decided to join him. I got a cute shot of all of them on the swings. I had to stand very far away to get them all in. Some how they all ended up in age order from left to right. There were 6 swings and 6 children.