Summer Recap

Well, we pretty much took the whole summer off from blogging. We were too busy enjoying the weather outside to blog!

This June we took our sweet Baby O camping about an hour north of our house. We went for two nights. She's such a trooper because it was HOT! (We also took the dog because I forgot to schedule him for boarding. Oops!)

I think Olivia's favorite part about camping was her toddler-sized camping chair. It matched ours: blue with a Gator logo, of course! She also really enjoyed making a camping sensory box. She collected rocks, sticks, and leaves to put inside.





When it got too hot, we let her cool off in our camping bucket.



Fourth of July was a lot of fun this year. We took a picnic and both Grandma and Yaya with us. Olivia had so much fun watching the other kids running around. And she absolutely loved the fireworks. She kept signing more and pointing to the sky. I was worried she would be afraid, but she wasn't at all.

Later in July we took our annual family vacation to North Carolina to visit with family in the mountains. YaYa went with us this year too. Usually Grandma goes as well, but she couldn't this year.

While we were there Olivia spent a ton of time with her cousins. She enjoyed swimming in the lake and the square dance. We also put her on Pete's back for some beautiful hiking.

When we were home, we spent a lot of time at the pool, local spray parks, and playgrounds. We discovered that Olivia really loves watermelon.

In August, we had family from California come visit us. Olivia got to meet her Great Aunt Jenny and her cousin Nadine. We showed them a true Midwestern summer tradition: the festival. We went to a balloon festival nearby. It was so windy that the balloons couldn't take off, but they were able to do a balloon glow. I'm glad we stuck around to see it. We were up close and personal with the balloons, and it was just amazing to see.

While they were here, we also visited our local children's museum to play. And we went hiking in the same state park where we went camping earlier in the summer. Finally we went to our little zoo and went swimming and had a cookout.

It was a really nice visit.

We had so much fun this summer, I was sad to see it go. But we are really enjoying fall as well. I'll get to that next time. Sounds like today's nap is over!