park and bowling

We have good friends that we meet up with once a week in the summer. For our first outing this year, we met at a new park for lunch.

It's a great park with fun water features but, being new, it was very crowded. The kids had fun anyway; the little ones in the water, the bigger ones playing frisbee.

Afterward, to escape the heat, we used our free bowling coupons from AMF.

the one-armed owl

On a recent Saturday, we visited a nearby nature preserve that was hosting free tours. We arrived one hour before it closed since I didn't check the hours ahead of time -- oops!

So our time there was brief, but Zane was able to devour a hot dog:

and we got to meet and hear the tale of Frosty the owl.

He was initially hit by a car and the family that hit him took him home, where their dog attacked him and ripped his wing off. They then decided to place him in their freezer. ?? After a couple days, they finally called somebody and he was rescued. So they gave him the name Frosty. He was just beautiful with those huge, golden eyes.

I was able to take a nice shot of my boys:

I'm hoping to take advantage of more free activities this summer. If you know of any, please share. =)

Summer!

I finally feel like our summer has arrived. Last week we finished up Options and the kids work here at home. Over the holiday weekend, Scott took the kids up to my parents house in the mountains and I had the house ALL TO MYSELF. I got a lot of cleaning done and it stayed clean for 3 whole days! Until they arrived back home. LOL I also got some good reading time in, which was very nice.

By Monday, though, the house felt lonely and WAY too quiet. I was ready to welcome them home when they arrived in the afternoon. Brenna is staying with her grandparent until next weekend, so it's all boys this week!

We had our first summer dinner on the grill and spent the evening enjoying the outdoors and doing some yard work.

Yesterday we went to the first of the cheap kids movies. We saw Charlotte's Web. I talked Aiden and Zane into posing by the water in front of the theater.

I'm always looking for things for the kids to do around the house in summer. I saw this idea for sidewalk paint on Pink and Green Mama's blog and we tried it today.

It worked great and Aiden spent a good hour painting away. Here is his first creation. Gotta love that I was mentioned. =)

Next time I'll work on making the colors darker and getting more of a variety of colors. But this was definitely an easy idea to implement.

Then tonight we went and watched Conner and Scott at their weekly bowling league.

So that's our summer off to a good start!