Click on photos for captions

When we started the Summer of Fun!!!, I anticipated many, many posts about our adventures.  I didn’t anticipate we would be so busy that I’d have no time to talk about our capers.  I envisioned long lazy summer days of crafting and playing.  I didn’t envision weeks upon weeks of rain, and the amount of time the girls would want to spend playing WITHOUT ME.  So to summarize via a photo essay, here are a few of the things we’ve been up to:

There has been a lot of fruit picking, including delicious cherries in Pa Pa Bill and Oma’s backyard:

Cherry picking leads way to cherry eating:

When the rain hasn’t been falling, we’ve been outside (always with snacks in tow; they like individual custom baggies marked with their names):

When the rain hasn’t been falling AND it’s been hot, we’ve been in a myriad of pools, namely the one in our backyard (or front yard, depending on my mood)…and by the way, I don’t make them wear angel wings in baby pools.  They insist.:

It’s Indiana in the summer, which really only means one thing for certain: we’ve shucked A LOT of bicolor sweet corn.  AAAAA LOOOOTTT of corn:

If you shuck it, you gotta cook it.  We’ve eaten our fair share of corn at the Farmer’s Market on Wednesdays where they serve it hot off the grill, husks intact, dipped in butter.  These girls are now made of nothing but sweet corn, cherries and watermelon.  Forget sugar, I’ve turned them into diabetics with PRODUCE.  We’ve cooked a lot of other things too, also made primarily of sugar:

We’ve been art-focused in the mornings: painting with Q-Tips, making our own Father’s Day cards, painting with sponges, decorating sun catchers and tiaras:

In the afternoons, we’ve tried a bit of curriculum, but I didn’t want to overdo it.  I wanted to focus on creativity this summer.  Sara calls it her “crooky mum”, and the girls have enjoyed it immensely.  We’ve used Pre-K workbooks, dry erase letter tracing boards, memory games, and songs about “days of the week” (Thank You Amie S.!):

Grandma has joined us for some adventures: the days the rained nearly took us under and Grandma showed up with a life raft and an umbrella.  She took the girls to consignment and bought them treasures of princess dresses (which I am still repairing!..hee hee).  She’s been with us to the fruit fields, Farmer’s Market day, trips to get donuts, and of course the girls’ favorite day when Grandma bought them all matching jelly shoes:

We’ve also had adventures with friends, one in particularly fun that included the Eagle Creek Nature Center and an outdoor picnic:

Kelly now sits in bed at night making lists of things that don’t scare her: “I not ‘fraid of snakes.  I not ‘fraid of spiduurrsss.  I not ‘fraid of ‘elotopters (helicopters)”.  After coming face to face with the snake above, I think she’s proven herself.  And probably the centerpiece of every day, requiring me to keep constant check on the number of dishes available for play, are the tea parties.  They spend so much time setting up tea parties that they often fail to actually HOLD the tea party, but really, decorating is half the fun:

Oh there is more, so much more.  Dress up and mess up and jive talkin’.  There’s the library and the garden, and the unbelievable fact that Avery finally learned how to pump her legs on the swing.  WOOPITY DOO!  But one thing I know to be true: despite the numerous pictures you see, most are never captured.  I can juggle a great many things, but the 3 girls, the wagon, and the 3 bags it takes to get us in and out of the sprinkler park is my limit.  I can rarely seem to add a camera to the list!  Hope your summer is also turning out to be a SUMMER OF FUN!!!