July in a flash!

Summer always goes by fast but this one is going by REALLY fast. Here are the highlights of July.

July 4, 2014

July 4, 2011

We celebrated our three year anniversary of living in Maryland!  A lot has happened in three years!

Our ward hosted their annual 4th of July breakfast. We made another trip to the dollar store to buy stuff for the kids to bling out their bikes for the parade. Charlie opted to decorate his roller skating this year, I loved roller skating as a child and am happy he enjoys it as well.

After the parade and breakfast we pulled out the jump ropes. It’s crazy to think that we were able to jump rope happily outside in July but the weather was heaven with low humidity.  There was even a band playing patriotic music for the parade.

On the afternoon of the fourth, Seth took the older kids swimming and I relaxed at home while Conrad slept. We drove into DC shortly before the fireworks started and pulled of the side of rode by the Pentagon to watch. For the amount of effort we put into the experience, the payoff was great. We got turned around coming home because they closed some freeway entrances but it still took us about the same amount of time it took us to come home from the Rockville Firework show last year.

We celebrated 7-11 with free Slurpees and also hit up Chick-Fil-A for free dinner that evening by dressing up as cows. I sadly neglected to get a group picture.

The kids took more rounds of swimming lessons and they all improved. Matthew got bumped up to Charlie’s class which but he rose to the challenge by perfecting his front crawl and kick. Charlie can freestlye across the entire length of the pool!! Lucy……..finally put her head under the water. We had four rules for her every day and we recited them in the car: 1. No crying 2. Stay in the pool 3. Keep your goggles on and 4. listen to your teacher!! If she obeyed all the rules we went to McDonalds for ice cream cones. Out of eight lessons we got cones twice. Hopefully next year goes better.

Other than swim lessons we were able to spend more time at the pool playing. Conrad’s two favorite things in the world are his friend Willa and blueberries. He would eat them all if I let him.

Before and After

I entered an online weight loss competition with some friends in May. It lasted for eight weeks and ended on July 18. I ended up winning 10th place and $150 bucks!! Not only could you win for percentage of weight loss but you could also win for accumulation of points. You earned points every day for healthy behaviors like exercising, eating fruits and veggies, drinking lots of water, and more. Crazy thing……eating less and exercising more really does lead to weight loss!

Kids entertaining themselves  and box forts!

At the end of July  was the climatic point of our whole summer which was our move down the street. This move really didn’t need to happen. The owners of our townhome decided they wanted to move back into the townhome so they would not renew our lease…..then they changed their mind. By the time they decided to re-rent it we had already signed a new lease and given our new landlord a lot of money. So, we moved and then new renters moved in a week later.

Old Home

New Home

The move itself wasn’t too bad because we had an overlap of the places so we were able to make trips in the minivan a few times a day and unload it. By the time the day came to actually “move” we only had furniture left. I tried to put stuff away as it came in so we were able to reuse boxes. Our new home is also almost identical to our old home so that made the configuration of things a lot easier. We have a more open floor plan upstairs and we have color on our walls which are both improvements.  We don’t have an oven but that’s just a small detail we will laugh about some day.

Right in the middle of our move week, we celebrated Seth’s birthday! We needed some fun and loved celebrating the star of our family. This man is everyone’s favorite and we are so grateful for all he does. For his birthday I arranged for us to go play racquet ball together. We hadn’t played since we were in college but it all came back. Seth killed me once again but it was still fun!

The week after we moved Charlie went to cub scout camp for four days. He loved it all but especially archery and shooting. He would give us a play-by-play of all of his shots when he returned.

We also went to the library a few times where the kids checked out an insane amount of books with many of those being Garfield books. I’m not sure how it got started but Charlie, Matthew, and Lucy have all become completely obsessed! It started with the books and then they discovered the show on Netflix. Lucy always wants me to read them to her even though most of the time I don’t think she understands the jokes but she laughs anyway.

The weather has been ideal this summer! We have had some warm days but we have also had some really mild low humidity days. We stopped at the park one morning after dropping Charlie off at cub camp and it was barely 60 degrees and the kids were shivering.