End of Summer Fun

After returning from our trip, we only had a few precious days before school started. This was our plan for those days:

1. Organize school clothes and set out outfits for each day of the first week (Joseph did not participate in this particular ritual.  I'm thinking it's a girl thing to obsess over new school clothes).
2. Load backpacks with new supplies.
3. Finish moving all of Aubrey's things from her old room to her new room.  
4. Help Bailey do a massive overhaul of her closet/room. We bagged up a HUGE pile of DI stuff from each of the kid's rooms the week before school.  We are in the get-rid-of-it mode!  Well, at least I am.
5. Stay up late every night, even though we theoretically were going to start "moving our clock back" to make it easier to get up for school.  Yeah, that didn't happen.
6. Eat lots of fresh veggies and fruit, some of it from our garden.
7. Revel in the beautiful weather. We deserve sunshine and we love it! (If only we could bottle it up to pull out in February.)
8. Enjoy playdates with friends.  Bailey attended a movie party with her awesome group of friends.  Joseph had at least one friend over each day.  Aubrey also hung out with her friend Laura.  On the day before school started  Aubrey and Laura  picked a recipe off of one of Aubrey's Pinterest boards (Aubrey and Bailey are both devotees of Pinterest) and made chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. They made a huge mess, but the end result was delicious!

 You can't really see it in the picture, but they had frosting all over their faces. And all over the kitchen, too.

  They had cleaned up their faces, but I told them to smear some more on for the picture.

 
   9.  That night Dan set up our tent in the back yard, and we did my favorite kind of camping. The kind where you still get to be outside, breathing the crisp and cool night air, but are close to a bathroom, a kitchen, and the couch (I may have defected to the couch at about 3 a.m. when I couldn't feel my hip joints or left arm after sleeping on the ground.)   Bailey missed the fun because she was at a party until late. Besides which, our five-man tent only really fits 3 or possibly 4 of us comfortably!

10.  We also spent some time catching up on our Book of Mormon reading. We are following a schedule our Stake President gave us at the last Stake Conference, with the goal of completing the Book of Mormon by the next Stake Conference. Our Disney trip threw us off a bit, but we're catching up. Right now we're in the end of Helaman.

11.  Dan did oodles of Seminary preparation. Reading,thinking, printing things off, buying supplies for his class and putting together awesome binders for each student. The whole family helped out with the prep, and we made a huge mess.

And that was the end of our summer.  We loved it - every bit of it!