August Adventures

August has been another busy month of summer fun for our family. 

In early July Hudson asked "Mom, did you sign me up for soccer camp?" to which I replied no, as he's never shown any interest in soccer. He then told me he wanted to do two camps this summer - VBS and soccer camp. So I found a soccer camp he could do with his friend Ethan. Though it wasn't quite the camp I'd hoped for, Hudson and Ethan loved it.

Hudson suffered from an extreme case of Olympic Fever, catching on quickly to the competition and busying himself with making Olympics from lego and tracking medals for imaginary countries in his imaginary Olympics. One day he taped off swimming lanes on the kitchen floor, put on his bathing suit, grabbed some stuffies and started having swimming races. He loved watching the Olympics on TV, especially swimming and diving. We also kept track of how many medals several real countries earned, using stickers and big chart paper.

Hailey continues to be very maternal, playing gently with her dolls. She also LOVES the dress Aunt Kiki gave her for the 4th of July and wears it whenever it's clean. This patriotic dress (red and white stripes on the top, blue with white stars on the bottom) stands out like a sore thumb in Canada, but she doesn't care.

Our cousins came for lunch.

Hudson came home from kindergarten one day in late June and announced that a librarian had come to his classroom and he wanted to be a part of the Summer Reading Club. We signed up Hailey, too. Both kids earned a medal for reading for 7 weeks this summer - Hudson doing the reading and Hailey doing the listening.

It's been hot here the past week and we've spent several afternoons keeping cool at Brae Island and in the backyard. 

In recent weeks Hudson and Hailey have been playing together SO MUCH BETTER, which is a joy to observe and also provides me a few more opportunities to get things done.

We went for a second camping trip, this time in Washington, with friends from university. We'd camped with these friends for five summers in a row, but took a four year break when everyone had young kids. This year we gave it another try and we had a great time. It was neat to see our kids all enjoy one another.

Here are the 8 kids lined up from oldest to youngest.

We spent a night with Grammy on either end of our camping trip. On our way home Hailey wanted to put a hat on Grampy's tree, which is something we've done the past two years at Christmas. Grammy found the Santa hat but then Hailey wanted to wear it herself as she felt it gave her "Elsa hair" (long hair). Grammy found another Santa hat for the tree and Hailey wore her Elsa hair to bed.