This week of August, the last week of summer

We're staying at a cabin on the river with Patrick's parents now, the last weekend before the kids are back in school. Sitting out on the porch, its really pretty and quiet right now, listening to the buzzing of cicadas in the trees. All is calm except, of course, Hugh toddling around messing with my stuff, trying his best to take this phone from me!

He's been obsessed with taking my phone from me and looking around through it on camera mode. He smiles and giggles and sometimes inadvertantly takes photos. Little baby feet are now well documented!

Here he is pullong my yoga mat out all by himself and doing downward dog. He watches EVERYTHING we do!

We got a big rain, and the kids discovered they could make the puddle water spray with Will's bike. A wet, fun, mess!

Football practice has already started. They seem to be practicing alot. Will and Lexa are playing flag football, and Lexa is also doing cheerleading. The little ones have been playing at the playground next to Lexa's practice . They took their pictures last weekend.

Then we went to lunch at the The Oasis, where Lexa had been asking me to take her daily for at least a week. Mainly I think it's because of her love affair with pickled okra from the salad bar. She went to town. Here's her plate.
After that, it was haircuts and new shoes for school kids for a new school year.

In other news, Patrick surprised me and bought me an amazon echo, out of the blue, which I've been playing with all week. (We've changed its name to echo rather than the very confusing in our house, Alexa.) I'm always listening to podcasts and npr throughout the day. I've also started playing more music on it too and making some playlists. I made each of the kids a playlist too. They're always playing something on it also.
Their playlists:

My mom sent me some new clothes and these pretty new sandals for my birthday! It's making me so happy everytime I look down and see my pretty feet.

They had a special horse story time at the Uvalde library. Lexa really liked meeting the pony.

While we were going to that, Patrick texted to say he had tickets to a space and dinasaur park that we'd never gotten a chance to visit that expired that very day. So we hopped in the car and started a spontaneous road trip. When I was entering the location into gps, I realized this place was 15 minutes from my parents' house, so we added a little impromptu visit to them too! Sara cooked yummy spagetti for dinner and we went swimming. Yay for fitting one more last minute pool day into our summer!

The space park had signs about each planet in the solar system spaced apart according to their light speed distance. There's the "sun" behind Tiimmy.

I liked the Dinosaur Island sign.

Parasaurolophus is my favorite dinosaur because it brings me back memories of reading dinosaur books to toddler Timmy, where i first heatd of that one.

Will didn't pay much attention to the information about planets and dinos, but he really liked these purple thistles pictured behind him.

It's been a great week! Im hoping to make these weekly recaps one of my new habits for fall. Hope I keep it up. We'll see!!