Bella, Gabe and Josiah

This boy loves his cats. Luckily they tolerate him…

We’ve been having a crazy heat wave. Sure, the number may but be as high as other places, but when it gets hot up here, it’s crazy hot, no one knows what to do and we all kindof freak out. It’s super fun… But it also means that we all make a concerted effort to be outside. That part really is fun. So after church, we hiked out to Boyscout Beach and had a picnic. It was lovely. It was the perfect way to spend a sunny, summer day.

The boys have been having a great summer. Between hanging out with Gram and Gramps and Auntie Cathy, they are having fun. There have been multiple trips to Costco, hiking on trails, hot chocolate dates, playing on excavators, trips to the fish hatchery and I don’t even know what else. So here they are having entirely too much fun without me… You know Josy has a fun time when he fell asleep in the car and stayed asleep when you get him out of the car too…

We continued our 4th of July tradition of going to see the fireworks on the 3rd at Aunt Jan’s house. There was no way we could miss it, Josy would have been devastated! He’s been asking about it for months and the other day Aunt Jan came to our house for dinner. The next morning he woke up in tears because “we missed the fireworks!!” No. We did not. They just hasn’t happened yet. This year, no one got sick, which helped a lot! But this is also the only picture I took. Poor Gabe was so wiped out that I’m surprised he made it until midnight. He’d hiked up one of trails up into the mountains, a six mile hike, while following a bunch of kids that were significant bigger than he was. He did great, but it was a lot of work to keep up. The kid was exhausted… A couple of months (or years? I lost track) ago, we were at an airport and Gabe found the bin of free books. Naturally he had to dig through and he found a book about a kid that was trying to figure out what George Washington ate for brea...

Well, we’ve been home about 3 weeks. In that time we’ve had a week off jetlag, Pat and Gabe went to Seattle for a doctors appt, two weeks of swim lessons for Josy, daycare being closed for a week, a week of hiking camp for Gabe, a retirement party for my boss, Great Gram visiting and the 4th of July. Luckily Pat only had one work trip in the middle of that. Oh, and Pat’s had a headcold basically since we got back. Life is not boring, that’s for sure… Here’s the last couple of weeks in pictures… We went to the park to play. I thought I was going to get to drink my iced coffee while the boys played. Gabe thought we were there to play baseball. I’m trying to convince Gabe that the more time he pours into teaching Josy to play ball, the more it will pay off later. As such, he spent a long time helping him told his hands right and getting his feet right. Eventually he put the bat in the bunt position and I thought the ball at the bat and Josy was so excited that he’d hit the ball. We spent ...