Busy summer

Many of the blogs I read talk about how they are enjoying their summer freedom- all the adventures they are taking with their kids and their lack of schedule.  And I have to say, we don't really have that over here.  Between Daddy's races and our events up at the cabin, my weekends are mostly gone.  And Tyler has summer school most of the week.  I will have three weeks in August in-between schools, and I will be spending as much of that time as possible outside at the cabin to potty train Tyler.  For now, we are just running back and forth all day, it seems.

So here are some catch-up pictures.

Tyler is really enjoying summer school.  He goes to school in the mornings three times a week, and then every Wednesday afternoon we go out and do something fun with his little group.  One of my favorite things about this group is our leader and how goal oriented she is.  On the first outing, we all got balloons to hold as we walked up to a waterfall area and back.  The kids jostled a bit over taking other balloons or protecting their own, but towards the end of the activity I still hadn't figured out the significance of why we had balloons with us.  "Oh, that's [so-and-sos] goal," she said.  "He is practicing sharing, and balloons and balls are his favorite things.  So we all got them so he can practice asking to trade balloons, or understanding that some of the balloons don't belong to him."  Awesome.

One of Tyler's goals is to recall past events.  While we have seen progress on some goals, this is one we have never gotten anywhere on.  So she had me take pictures so we can show him at the end what he did and ask him about it. I've done this before a few times - sometimes I print out pictures after vacations and make books to review things with him.  But I certainly don't do it enough.  So the next time we went and painted ceramics.  Tyler LOVED this.  He has been really into drawing and art stuff lately, so he was very serious about this task.

The first time she quizzed him as we were walking back to school, he didn't remember what we had done.  But the second time, she asked him what we did today and he said "plate"!  That might be just one word, but I can honestly tell you it was the first time he had said anything about a prior event.  Fantastic.  And when he got the plate back from being fired the next week, he spent days carrying it around the house. 

Now, most of the pictures I have taken are just terrible shots with my .7 meg iPod camera so that Tyler can see things and get his memory jogged.  But we have gone to the Dinosaur museum, he went to the Bean museum with Daddy, and we also went to his favorite restaurant- Pirate Island.  Land of the pizza buffet (he ate four slices), arcade games, and blue candy he got from his tickets.  He talked about this blue candy like it was the best prize in the universe.

Last weekend we had some friends up for a lovely day at the cabin.  But before they got here, Kaitlyn and I found a little baby bird learning to hop around and fly.  He was so adorable!  I mostly kept Kaitlyn away, but I couldn't resist letting her hold him for a minute and getting a cute picture of them.

Once our friends got here, Kaitlyn declared she wanted to hold the baby.  This always makes me laugh, because Kaitlyn is so skinny the babies she wants to hold are sometimes the same weight as her.  But she adores sitting on a couch and having a baby placed on her lap anyway.  In fact, last week I tended a cute little guy and she insisted on feeding him.  She even did a pretty good job with the spoon, putting just a little baby food on each time.

But nothing that day could top playing with baby Samantha's older brother Cody.  Cody is only six months older than Kaitlyn, and they get along fabulously.  They both have enough of a strong will that they don't let the other one take over, but they really are great friends.

Melissa said that if they get married someday, we are going to have an awesome wedding slideshow for them :)

The day after they went home, we headed down to watch Christopher run a half marathon.  This one starts about two miles from our cabin, actually - so we didn't have to go far!  Christopher was really pleased with his time, too.

And the highlight of my day was at the finish line.  They had a bounce house for the kids and a true hot air balloon!  Unfortunately, in the spirit of packing lightly I just had my camera and my 100mm prime lens on me, since I zoom in to get shots of Christopher running.  But that made it very hard to get a picture of us and the balloon at the same time.  Rest assured, the Remax balloon took us up 50 feet and brought us back down.  For free! 

We have also been working on some updates to the cabin while it is summertime.  We can only bring up necessities in the winter by snowmobile, so now is the time.  I added some scenery to my big wall upstairs.

And this weekend we brought up a "new" washing machine and this sail shade.  The washing machine we bought used, but we are very happy about this.  The old one at the cabin was such an energy hog that it would chug and sputter on the big, loud generator.  But this new front-loading one ran just fine on the solar panels alone! 

As for the sail shade, this was Christopher's answer to the dead canopy.  This way there is no metal to break.  The reviews online said they just keep it up all summer, and the material weathers through wind and rain just fine.  We shall see!

This weekend we hosted Christopher's co-workers up for dinner, and had an absolute blast.  The only sad part was that I was so busy running around, filling dishes and chatting with people, that I didn't take a single picture.  But trust me, we had 30 people over for dinner yesterday.  On a funny note, I wanted to make brownies to go with the homemade strawberry ice cream, but the brownie mix at the cabin was bug-eaten.  So I attempted brownies from scratch with hot cocoa powder replacing the sugar and cocoa.  Amazingly, they weren't awful!  They were odd - they really did taste like hot cocoa somehow - but they truly made brownies.  Who knew?