The past few weeks have been non-stop craziness and fun. The last weekend in June, we went for the first of 2 annual camping trips. Despite some major storms that blew through Friday night, we had a blast as always. We did have to bid farewell to a second pop-up (easy up) tent. We lost our first one in a similar storm camping 2 years ago around the same time. Of the 4 tents that were up covering our food and eating area, only ours was damaged. It’s gotten to be such a joke that last Friday, when we put up a new-new-new pop up in the backyard for Aiden’s Saturday birthday, all the neighbors said we should probably take it down given our “Friday night luck with pop up tents”. ha!

We returned home from camping and began the two-day clean-up process that found us at Wednesday, July 4th. We enjoyed the annual bike parade through the neighborhood followed by our traditional post-parade swim in the clubhouse pool. That night we got together with a family down the street for some delicious fish tacos before heading around the bend to witness the fireworks show from a neighbor’s back yard.

Brian took the entire week of the 4th off and it was a VERY good thing because we had two birthday parties for Aiden. One was for his preschool friends on Friday the 6th and the other was for the neighborhood crew and family on Saturday the 7th. This year’s theme was “Splash Bash” and was all about water balloon games. Between the two parties, I filled up about 650 water balloons! Two of my friends helped me out one day and the three of us covered about 200 of those together.

We are now to Wednesday of the week after the parties. Brian has returned to work, the house has returned to normal and I’ve returned to the blog ;) Here are about a gazillion pictures of our crazy summer weeks:

CAMPING

One of the best things about camping is constant access to junk food!

It was HOT that weekend…so we brought along 2 water slides and…

a big inflatable pool. Any excuse I can have to avoid the pool at the campgrounds is GOOOOOD!

For a while on Saturday, the men had a little man-cave under a tent. 

“Hey mom…take a picture of my nose sweat!”

At one point, Logan took me on a walk in the forest and pointed out all his favorite spots. He’s a little nature lover!

We ran into a bunch of “sassy girls”  

The smaller camp sites across the road weren’t reserved the weekend we were there so, at one point when our shade ran out, we dragged some chairs across the way and made a little hang out under the trees.

Brian bonding with the two other little guys at camping: Matt and Dustin.

FOURTH OF JULY BIKE PARADE

AIDEN’S BASEBALL GAME ON JULY 2nd

I’ll put the party highlight pics in a separate post…