We’ve had a one-week break between travels and I set the goal to give everyone some much-needed downtime and we had just that for several hours every day.
However, downtime gets old really quickly chez nous. Here are a few things we did to curb off the summer doldrums:
Two weeks of outdoors swim lessons with several of my besties from our ward. It was like a pool party every day.
And as a total bonus, both kids passed their classes. Hadley is now in the top class on her way to swim team and Bode passed his first class (Trouts) ever and is now a Duck.
If you’ve followed his swimming missteps, you’ll know this deserves a celebration.
We also took our neighbors to the Children’s Museum of Denver. We were regulars when the kids were younger but haven’t been back for a couple of years because they’re in school and I thought they’d outgrown it.
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| Sean & Bode inside a bubble at the Bubble Exhibit |
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| Hadley with real power tools: watch out |
Five hours later, I realized I could not have been more wrong.
We spent Family Home Evening flying a kitean airplane.
It was obviously intense.
We threw Bode a “Pretend Birthday” because we’ll be in Canada for his birthday.
More on that later but those (wet) projectile weapons sure were real.
And last but definitely not least, we spent the afternoon boating and playing at Chatfield State Park with the youth from church. Remember how June had record-breaking heat? The one day we planned our beach visit, it was blustery, windy and rainy.
However, we still had a blast and created even more memories than if it had been sweltering.
Mostly because my memories would have been bad ones.
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| Hadley tubing with two of her babysitters |
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| Bode warming up with Bryan |
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| Stomp Rockets: something I need to add to our toy collection |
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| Hadley & Morgan snuggling up under our canopy as it poured |
One of the great things in the Mormon church is we have a non-paid clergy and are asked to serve in a number of different capacities. I’ve pretty much had the opportunity to do it all–from working with the younger kids to the adults to teaching gospel doctrine to throwing parties to serving in presidencies. But hands down, my favorite favorite favorite calling ever is teaching the youth.
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| 3 of the 4 girls I teach at church. Awesome young ladies! |
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| Our group of youth |
P.S. Did you know “sick” is out and the new, hip word is “That is so ‘beast?’”)
Because there’s nothing like a 40-year-old pretending to be cool.
But I’m telling you, this overheated summer has been anything but.
I'm a Canadian-born mom of two, former Denver Post columnist, family travel writer, editor of MileHighMamas.com and 9News contributor. Expert on all things Utah, Denver, family and travel. Lover of laughter and life. Happily married to a man obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. 