These summer days are messy, tiring, happy, and perfect! Jacob and Zachary have been taking golf lessons every week with a few buddies. One day they forgot a water bottle on the course. I sent them back to get it, and when they came back 15 minutes later, they were loaded down with golf balls--Zachary could barely walk for the bulge of his pockets!
Their ideas intrigue me--like attaching the hose to the back of Adam's bike so that he can be a "moving sprinkler." Adam learned to ride a two-wheeler this week, and he races around the neighborhood like a rocket (except with the hose; they learned quickly that it wasn't as fun as it seemed!).
The boys are always imagining. They call their pretend play "Mom and Dad." They play "Mom and Dad Pirate," "Mom and Dad Camping," "Mom and Dad Skiing," ad infinitum. My favorite is when they play just plain "house," or as they call it, "Mom and Dad Original." The other day I overheard them playing "Mom and Dad Poor" and they were counting up pennies and trying to think of ways to save money. Ha!
Zach and I shared a fun day at his Cub Scout camp, shooting arrows and rock climbing and taking in Scout food and silly skits. I can't remember a time when he and I had ever had a day-long date like that. I enjoyed him so much.
Around town we've been busy with city events. The free traveling art projects with the Art Cart have filled a few happy afternoons: Here's Michael putting his mark on the famous shoe slide. Kids paint it every summer with the help of area art teachers. The outside is a Lorax-esque mural.
The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery offers thoughtful, fun science programming for kids. Jacob won a construction contest there by building a 29-inch tall spaghetti and marshmallow structure:
They also have the kids work with real instruments in real labs. Here Zachary uses a micropipette to create a polymer mold, used to illustrate scaffolding in tissue engineering.
The geology museum never disappoints, and Camp Randall is fun. (Here the kids kept insisting that the statue behind them was "Burlington" of Burlington Coat Factory. That's why they wanted to pose next to it. They make me smile a million times a day!)
And $1.50 ice cream at the university creamery? Every trip to campus deserves one (or five) of these!
Other days have been boating days (tubing with sweet ward girls),
visiting days (picking raspberries with dear Ann),
climbing days (posing after scaling a glacier-formed granite hill for two hours!),
digging days (digging out canals with our hands because I always forget the shovels!),
and, of course, baseball days (Jacob pitching in his last tournament game).
What will we do with only one month left of summer? I want to do everything again, plus some more.
