Things have been a little quiet around here as we wrapped up the school year and dove into the first week of summer. But we’ve been having fun with our more relaxing days and I’d thought I’d share a few photos.
Last Friday was the boys’ last day of school. Woooooo! I have a big first grader and a sixth grader in the house now. I pulled a photo from the first day of school back in August to see how they’ve changed and they sure do look a lot older. Also shaggier. And it seems they are also somehow dirtier? (That may have more to do with photos taken before vs. after school though….)
This is what Saturday — the first day of summer break — looked like. Ugh. I love living in the San Francisco bay area, but sometimes I hate it too. We persevered in spite of the 55 flippin’ degrees and put on flip-flops and shorts but we also wore big, cozy hoodies so we wouldn’t freeze.
Earlier in the week, one of my kids was arguing with me about video games (sigh) and I accused him of being addicted to them. He countered by telling me I was “addicted to boring family hikes.” Though he was dead serious, I couldn’t help myself and I started giggling like crazy. I am addicted to family hikes, I guess — though I don’t personally find them boring so Sunday afternoon, we struck out for a local park to tromp through some redwoods. These aren’t the monster redwoods of my beloved Muir Woods, but they are still huge and gorgeous.
Does my family look sufficiently bored here?
No?
I better work on making these hikes more boring….
I’m pretty strict about our screen time rules during the summer so the boys needed to find a way to entertain themselves without tv or video games while I ran errands and got the house in order Monday morning. The result: shenanigans!
Later in the day, we all went over to the beach along with one of Wyatt’s buddies. The boys collected tiny crabs and dead jellyfish in a bucket to “rehabilitate” them, threw buckets of water on each other and pretended that their long, skinny cookies were cigars while I read a book. Perfection.
And then that night a squirrel got into a local substation and knocked out power to 45,000 homes while we were getting the kids ready for bed. We’d planned to all watch a little tv together, but that plan obviously needed to change. Zach grabbed a beer and a book and sat on the front steps to read in the last evening light. I joined him about 30 seconds after I took this photo.
Traditionally, I keep the kids home from camp the first week of summer vacation and I try not to work much so we can get things started off right. Yesterday we hit the road and visited the Jelly Belly factory up in Fairfield. The last time I took the kids, Wyatt was younger than Augie and Augie was a baby in a stroller and neither of them remembered anything about the tour so it was fresh and fun for them.
Another highlight for them was trying yucky jelly beans from the Harry Potter and Bean Boozled lines. Here you can see Wyatt sample a dirt-flavored jelly bean. Blech!
And then this morning we woke up to an unexpected rain storm! We are starved for rain here in drought-stricken California, so of course the kids went outside at 8 am to run around, play catch and collect water in overturned umbrellas. I watched them through my dry bedroom window!
Have you started summer break yet? What fun things have you done?
