3 Sweet Girls: Our Summer

We are back to the blogging world! I honestly don't know where the summer went. We were busy all summer but I don't feel like we had a lot of plans or trips or anything. I guess Summer is just like that. And after living in Death Valley for four years where summer is an endless and extremely HOT 10 months, I think summer will now always feel very short anywhere else.

At any rate, here are some highlights from our summer. And now that we have started school again, I will hopefully be back to weekly blogging!

Day trip to Crater Lake

The girls and I were SO excited to get all of our homeschool materials for this year in July. They wanted to get everything out and look at it, so we made piles on the floor before I organized it all. We are so blessed to live here where we have a great homeschooling program and can get all these amazing books for our homeschool!

Yes, I forgot to turn my pictures before loading them on the blog. But it's late and I don't feel like redoing it. So turn your head please. This is the girls at Junior Ranger day at Lava Beds with Daddy.

One day we discovered that we could stick balloons on Hanna's head with static. The older girls thought this was great. I thought it was pretty funny too.

Camping trip to Redwoods in August with our good friends the Rasmussens

The kids had a great time again this year at the Tulelake fair

We started school at the beginning of September, and I quickly realized that Hanny didn't care if I had spent hours on school plans or that I had a daily schedule all laid out that seemed absolutely perfect on paper. So after about 6 days of trying to do school my way and Hanny screaming at me every one of those days, I realized that I would have to be more flexible. Instead of getting everything done in the morning on my schedule, on day 7 we got out the dried beans and measuring utensils and we all played with Hanny. After a long while of just playing, I took one of the older girls at a time and we got our lessons done. We did our literature at nap time and we finished science just before dinner, but we all had a really good day instead of a frustrating one. Lesson learned: be flexible; listen to your toddler; ENJOY your children instead of just checking things off on a list of things that must get done that day.

We just returned from our last trip of the summer around the Pacific Northwest, which, by the way, is my favorite place ever. This is Kaiya at a beach in Olympic National Park.