I seem to be falling farther and farther behind, so here comes a BIG SUMMER BLITZ to try and help me catch up. Random pictures, ahoy.
I try to take the kids and do fun stuff every summer. Once a couple of summers ago I took them mini golfing at Cherry Hill, and now they expect a trip every year. It is always fun, though my kids are giant mini-golf CHEATERS. Cora pretty much just puts her club on the ball and walks it to the hole.
Somewhere in the summer was the 4th of July! We did the usual stuff...fireworks at the golf course, then the Riverdale Parade. Here is a shot of the parade crew this year:
The kids were happy to "help" their cousin Emmy to get candy (except Dax. Dax is all about getting candy for Dax and Dax alone). Cora was very patriotic, and even went a step further and spilled this very red Otter Pop all over her blue and white shirt to make it red, white and blue!
Another essential summer day trip is to the planetarium. The kids loved trying out the various exhibits, and especially liked to do the weather report from one of Saturn's moons and also liked to drive around the moon rover A/C cars.
We of course made some more cabin trips. We met some cousins there for a long weekend. Cousins are the best!!
LaBeau's shakes aren't bad either.
My kids liked having their little baby cousin around. She was just learning to walk, and the girls especially loved sitting in a circle and seeing who she would walk to. Cora usually won, but Arden won this round:
We also love the aquarium! I tried so hard to get a picture of a penguin swimming by, but I couldn't do it...it is right between the girls' legs. Those penguins are speedy!
One day the kids got ambitious and decided to have a lemonade stand. Only their mom is lame and had no lemonade mix. So they had a treat stand instead. They were out there for longer than i thought they would be, and made a few dollars thanks to nice neighbors!
We also made a trip to the zoo. Dax and this lion looked at each other for a while, but by the time I took a picture the lion had drifted back to sleep. Still cool being so close to him.
This summer they had some scary visitors at the zoo, like this humongous tarantula. Yuck.
One of Arden's favorite things to do over the summer was go to get shave ice at Bahama Bucks, a new place near us. I like their Caribbean Cola (with Diet Coke of course).
We missed the demolition derby at the Weber County fair for some reason this year (was it earlier than normal? It completely flew by me), so I took the kids to the Davis County fair to try and make amends. There was no car crashing, but there was a little circus the kids liked, with trick ponies and a dog act and even a camel.
They especially liked the sea lion show they had there. Fun stuff!
Over the summer Dax watched a lot of Youtube videos of kids who made movies with their toy dinosaurs, pretending they were real dinosaurs. They often had their dinosaurs in "rivers" or other bodies of water. Dax liked to play with his dinosaurs the same way, and dug a big hole and a river in our front yard and liked to go out and run the hose down it and pretend his dinosaurs were doing dinosaur stuff (pretty much eating each other) near/in a river. Preston wasn't too happy about it.
On a later trip to the cabin we finally made it to the cave! Still fun for me even though I have been in there so many times.
We tried a new hike near Laketown that was supposed to lead to some springs. We walked and walked and walked but didn't make it to the springs before we gave up and turned around. We got to cross the stream a few times though, which was fun. Maybe we will try again next year.
What summer at the lake would be complete without one trip to see our favorite Spanglish thief? We love Juanito Bandito!
This year's show had new fancy TVs for backdrops for the first time. They were fun to see.
And, in a move I will probably always regret, we stayed home to watch the eclipse. It was going to be over 90% eclipse at our house, which I thought would be pretty much as good as a total eclipse. (94% is an "A," right?). We went outside and saw the cool shadows on the sidewalk from the trees, all in the crescent shape of the eclipse:
We made cereal box eclipse viewers to protect our little eyeballs from the sun:
And after it was over we went inside and watched CNN, where they had reporters in the "zone of totality." I didn't realize how much cooler totality would be! If I had known how much darker it got and the 360 degree sunset and all of that, I would have made the effort to drive a few hours and face the massive eclipse traffic jam! Oh well, I hear there is another one coming to Utah in like 40 years. Haha.
