Rambling...

I'll share more pictures from our trip soon. I just thought I'd ramble a bit tonight.... We are officially not doing school for the month of June (from our trip starting May 24-end of June). The last several summers we have continued to school through the summer, for various reasons. We usually reduced what we were doing, but it seemed like the best thing for them to keep up some of their skills and keep busy at mind-engaging things. Sometimes it worked out well and sometimes it didn't, especially in the last couple of years, so we're trying something totally different this year. June is entirely school-free. Sometime in July we plan to ease back into some school by starting Grammar and math again. Then, on the first of August, we plan to begin full-time school. We'll see how it goes. One does feel ready for a break when summer begins. So we're enjoying it. June will not be work-free. We hope to use some of the time to accomplish several home and yard projects and do a good deal of deep cleaning. But in between those things we have many fun outings and time outside planned.

This last week we started some of the deep cleaning, but a lot of the cleaning was just catching up from being gone to Oregon. We did take one day to enjoy some fun things. Thursday we went to a local park that is right next to the river. There's a paved trail that runs along the river, so we walked on that for a ways and then turned back. I had brought a snack, so we ended up going to a picnic table by the river to eat it and enjoyed seeing a large group of geese and a few ducks that wanted to share our snack. Then we played at the park and headed home to fix lunch. After lunch, I took the boys to the library while the girls were napping. We had a great time. We always have the girls with us when we go and it's hard for me to help the boys pick out books. They pretty much do it on their own and I look them over to approve them. We spent two, leisurely hours browsing books and finding some great reading material. Such fun. In the evening, we took a picnic dinner to a new park with Peter. It's new to us. We thought it would be fun to go see what it was like. It's in town, but it's way up high on a hill and has an amazing view! The weather was perfect and so we hiked to Skyrock which is at the very top of the hill to see the view. Beautiful. Truly, everyone has been in a better mood since we took that day to enjoy some new things together and do something out of the normal schedule at home. I'm grateful. God gives the breaks at just the right time. Time to stop rambling. Goodnight...