Enjoying Summer

The kids have been enjoying a little extra time in the mornings to watch cartoons.

Well, it seems that I have not had much time on the computer lately. That is a good thing! I have been having a wonderful summer hanging out with the kids and relaxing. YES! I said RELAXING!!! It has been incredible! I have cut down my workload to only what is necessary. Laundry, shopping and light cooking. We have been grilling and keeping food prep to a minimum, except for the Fridays when we have had company over. We have been to the water park, the free movies and of course to Gramma and Grampa's house to swim. We also went to an awesome concert series for the kids at the Hollywood Bowl! Gavin and I have watched the first two of the Harry Potter movies and Andy and I have a date on Friday to go out and see the new one and have dinner together. We made tie dye t-shirts with friends and are gearing up for our vacation.

We will be heading to Lake Cachuma in the hills above Santa Barbara. We had many ideas about this summers trip, Andy wanted to go to some lake somewhere and stay and I wanted to drive up the coast until we got to Oregon. We decided that the coast trip would be too much driving for the kids and not enough sitting for Andy. We have also had to scale back on the cost of our trip, due to a serious money crunch. Andy did work summer school, but the hours were cut and we were left with only half of the salary that we expected. We made some cut backs and it will certainly be tight, but we know that it will be fine. We are also trying to plan for the coming semester when I will be student teaching and not working at all. (eeek!)

The compromise was this: Go to Lake Cachuma and stay there for 12 days. Because we have a membership to the campground, we pay nothing for our stay and because it is so close, we pay almost nothing for our gas. I will follow Andy (driving the motorhome) with the van so that we can drive without unhooking and resetting up. There are TONS of things to do in the area, so I am happy about that! We plan to go into Santa Barbara, see the missions in the area, do some wine tasting, go horseback riding, visit Solvang, swim at the pool, do some nature hikes and a boat trip and do some more RELAXING!

Andy and I have been utilizing our Netflix and have watched a ton of movies and I have gotten through several novels! I usually only make it through one, maybe two! I read: Cry the Beloved Country, The Third Summer of the Traveling Pants, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Little House on the Prairie, The Shack, and The Good Earth. I don't know what I will pick up next, but look forward to cracking a new book! I also completed my scrapbook(s) for 2007. It was the longest and busiest year of our lives! The three books are 160 pages (320 sides!) and chock full of some great pictures of all of the fun stuff that we did that year!

The garden is in it's final days and we harvested quite a few cucumbers (I am making pickles later today!) The tomatoes have been mouth watering and my only disappointment is that the purple ones got too much shade and did not produce. The corn was purple and sweet and delicious and the harvest was plentiful. The snap peas never got pulled up and finally gave us a handful or two to enjoy. The carrots are still growing (although we picked a few baby ones to eat already) and the pumpkins are not very big, but growing! I would call this garden a success! Now, what to plant for fall and winter?

Today we did this:

We are still waiting on our Praying Mantis egg case to hatch, it may be a dud... but we are waiting! They will have to go on vacation with us (I am not thrilled) but the company has reassured us that they will send us a new one if nothing happens with this one.

Summer has been great and I am glad that it is not over yet....still more time to enjoy!