Busy Summer Days

We are busy these days!  The boys have been in swimming lessons everyday for the past two weeks.  And Jacoby is in a Lego engineering camp this week.  We've been having a lot of fun.  I'll let the pictures do most of the talking...

 The boys and I took advantage of a rare cool, cloudy day and visited the zoo.  We got there early, so the animals were quite active and interesting.

 They rode the carousal by themselves.

 We did a food allergy project where we cut out pictures of food from magazines.

 And then we glued the pictures into our "Safe" and "Not Safe" categories.  As you can imagine, we are talking a lot about this with Morgan, since he's off to Kinder in a month.

 We spent a day swimming at the pool and Jacoby conquered one of the big slides.  I lost track of how many times he went up and down this thing!

 The boys have been good buddies this summer and are always coming up with new ways to entertain themselves.

 They've also been really into reading this summer.  We can barely keep enough books in the house for Jacoby!  He's read through several book series, most of the Calvin and Hobbes books, and is now quite a ways into both The Hobbit and The Two Towers.  So thankful to have boys who love to read!

 The boys wanted to do some science experiments, so we tried rainbow eruptions one afternoon when thunderstorms kept us inside.

 These were simple but fun and interesting!

 Pretty rainbow colors.

 The boys picked blueberries off of our bushes.

And we've spent countless hours at a bunch of different parks around town!

We're off to Montana in a few days to spend time with family.  Justin will also be attending his 20th high school reunion.  And after that, it's a short couple of weeks before school begins!

4th of July

Since I had Thursday and Friday off of work last week, the boys and I headed up to Carter Lake for a day of fun and an overnight camping trip.

  

This was our first time visiting this very popular lake which is only an hour away.  The boys had a great time in the water.

 My beach buddies

 This is mini Camp Barber...we spring out the little tent and leave the green castle home when Mommy sets up camp by herself.  The four of us fit, but it's very cozy. (:

Mommy had a proud "I am woman! I make fire!" moment.  (:

 The boys expertly roasting hot dogs.

 By the end of the evening they were patiently waiting for Daddy to join us.

 We had a trail down to this rocky beach right by our camp site.

 We also indulged in S'mOreos...delicious!

 This was the lovely view from our camp site as the sun went down.  We had a great time on this over night adventure.  We were right at 5700 ft, so definitely low elevation camping for us.  But the warm evening was very nice.

 We came home, cleaned up, took naps, and lit a few sparklers.

You can tell which boy likes playing with fire!  We stayed up late to watch the city fire works.

The rest of the weekend we caught up around the house, the boys finished up their library reading projects, and we tried to stay cool in this hot, hot weather!

Camping at Blue Mountain

We had a great time camping at Blue Mountain last weekend.

The boys love camping.  Morgan actually started packing the car on his own Friday morning after he got tired of waiting on his pokey parents.  And both boys buckled themselves in and waited in their car seats with books until it was time to go.  (:

 Hanging out at Camp Barber

 Having dinner in the screen tent.  This is a lovely little camping invention that we added to our inventory this year--it provides shade and has drastically reduced the number of times a boy runs screaming away because a bug or two have helped themselves to their food.

 We went on a long hike one morning to look for animal tracks and scat.  I, unfortunately, got sick right before we were supposed to leave for this camping adventure.  I didn't have the heart to cancel on the boys, so I went anyways (probably not the wisest choice, given I'm on day three of antibiotics and had to miss a day of work), but we managed even if I was sort of just a bump on a log the whole weekend.

 This is a huge petrified redwood tree stump we got to see at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.  Colorado used to be filled with these big trees a very, very long time ago.

 We went on another hike through the petrified forest.  The boys had junior ranger workbooks, so they were looking for specific things to mark in their books.

We played by the river and the boys caught minnows

While Daddy tried to catch some real fish

 Morgan's way of roasting marshmallows...he's very anti-smoke-in-the-eyes

 Jacoby tackling roasting marshmallows like he does most things...very methodically and correctly.

 Can you see how dirty they are?!?!  They were filthy little creatures by the end of the weekend!

 I bought this silly game which has very little educational value, but somehow it makes the boys go looney tunes!  They just go crazy and get silly, in part I think because they like to gang up on Mommy (who still beats them so bad!).  It was the perfect way to spend time together in the tent before bed time (brrrr).

 We packed up camp and headed on our way Sunday morning.

  After we got cleaned up we were off to purchase a brand new washer and dryer!  Our old dryer has been screeching for a couple of months and the washer finally bit the dust late last week.  We really like this set and it actually reminds me of R2D2--it chimes, dings, and even sings a little melody when it's finished.  (:

Grandparents Visit & Summer Fun

 We were very fortunate to see Grandpa Michael and Grandmanette two weekends in a row (before and after Utah)!  They practiced drawing with Grandmanette.

 We went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2, which was excellent.

 There was also a fun trip to the book store and lots of reading and ipad time.

 We've also been playing in the sprinkler.

 And finding new splash parks around town.

We made cloud dough one day, which was fun and messy.

We're having a great summer!

Trip to Utah

Justin attended a conference a few weeks ago in Park City, UT, so the boys and I joined him.  We had a wonderful time exploring!

 Our drive through Wyoming was windy, rainy, and snowy all the way to Park City.  This was the view from our window when we arrived.

 On our first day, the boys and I drove into Salt Lake City to visit the Natural History Museum of Utah.  It's a great museum with lots to see and explore.

 The boys enjoyed the various dig sites around the museum.

 We spent one afternoon at Park City Mountain Resort, enjoying some of the summer activities and riding the chair lift.

 On our second day, we ventured back into the city to visit the new aquarium.  It was awesome and huge!

 We had a great time exploring all of the exhibits.

 We even splurged and went to the 4-D movie about sharks.

 By the time we were ready to leave, most of Utah had showed up.  It's a very popular, new attraction.

 We visited the Utah Olympic Winter Park on our last afternoon.  These are the medals from the Salt Lake winter games.

 This was one of the puppets from the opening ceremony.

 And we spent a lot of time watching the ski jumpers practice and land in this special pool.  So cool!

 The boys tried out this mini ropes course (although they really wanted to tackle the real ropes course that all of the big kids were going on).

 And we rode more chair lifts...

 After his conference each evening, Justin got to take the boys up the Canyons gondola.

 Having a great time and maybe slightly loopy because of the high altitude.  (:

We were so grateful for our special suite.  Thanks to Justin's conference rate, we were able to upgrade inexpensively so we had a full kitchen, two bathrooms, and large living room with fire place.  It was a lovely time and we hope to visit there again!