Summer So Far

I am finding it kind of ridiculous that it's already mid-June.  But we've been having a good old time, we five Scotts.

My biggest struggle has been balancing our unstructured fun time together with more structured learning activities.  Guess what is winning?  Unstructured days!  As I was feeding Hannah earlier and thinking/praying, I realized that I have been comparing myself to others' summer activities, and feeling slightly like a mom-failure.   I know will completely regret not taking advantage of the loosey-goosey days available right now.  Once August hits we'll be back to school, running with activities, and I'll be shuttling Joey 2x a week to/from pre-school.  The nice thing is that I DO have some learning activities on hand that we do several days a week... whenever we want... because we can!

For example, we found an Insect Lore butterfly kit at a bookstore 75% off, making it just $5.  We had one in my 5th grade classroom and I remember it being so neat!  Once we got home from Chicago we ordered our caterpillars (who thankfully didn't die of heatstroke sitting in our mailbox the day they arrived!) and watched them climb about in their jar.  Ben sketched pictures of what he saw.  Within a few days they climbed to the top of the jar, hung by their bottoms, and turned into chrysalises.  Once they did that, I moved they paper to which they're attached into the mesh tent.  We're now just waiting for the butterflies to emerge in the next several days! 

We've also been watching that Hannah girl grow, grow, grow.  She's almost four months old.  FOUR MONTHS OLD!!!!  She's talking to us all the time, growing out of her size 3 month clothes, putting herself to sleep (hooray!), chewing on her hands non-stop, giggling, lifting her head during tummy time, lifting her legs during back time, and spitting up a lot more because she's so wiggly.   

She couldn't take her eyes off this cereal box one day!!

Last week, Andrew took advantage of his time off work to visit his family in Decatur.  He took Ben and Joey, leaving Hannah and I together by ourselves.  Everyone had a great time!  Andrew got some good bonding time in with his sis and bro-in-law, the boys got to have tons o fun with their grandparents, and Hannah and I snuggled a lot, enjoyed the quiet, and got quite a bit done around the house. 

Lastly, we're gearing up for vacation Bible school at our church, which starts this coming Monday.  Andrew and I have lead the music rotation since 2004 (with the exception of me sitting out in 2006 with newborn Ben and working in the kitchen in 2008 when I was too big pregnant with Joey to dance around with kids for 3 straight hours!).   For the last month or so several of us have been meeting regularly to paint our cardboard sets.  This year the theme of our music area is the Matterhorn, so I've painted some scenery and am making lederhosen susupender t-shirts for us to wear.  We always dress up to go with our theme.  For fun, here are some pics through the years, although not from every single year.  My absolute favorite, not pictured here, is from 2005 when it was a road-trip theme and our music area was the garage (tune-ups, get it?!).  We wore cover-alls and smeared black mascara on our faces to look like grease monkeys.  :-)

2006 - I had to have an understudy while I took care of newborn Ben!

2007 - but no pictures of us in our area!  We wore sporty clothes though.

2009:  We were in the Sydney (Australia) Opera House, so we had to wear our concert black.  Andrew changed out colorful cumberbunds and bow ties each night.  :-) 

2010: Cowboy/girl on the ranch, swinging around our lassos.  

2011:  We were set on a Broadway backstage, so we wore all black stage crew outfits. 

And a preview of this year... Andrew's lederhosen t-shirt is ready for our aviation-themed week.  Can't wait!