Last days of summer

I was looking through a few photos on the computer and saw a few that hadn't been shared of what we've been up to for the past few weeks.  Here's how our last bit of summer vacation went down.

Some friends of ours live in the Blue Ridge neighborhood and invited us to spend time down at the beach with them. It was a beautiful evening spent with lovely friends.

 Cleaning their feet.

 We signed up Daniel for a week-long swimming lesson session. He had a great time, as usual.

Barbecue down at Nana and Papa's house with the cousins!

 Five of the six local cousins with Great Grandpa Milt on his birthday.

 Riding bikes up and down the block is getting pretty boring (for Daniel, especially), so we packed the bikes up one day and took them to the cemetery to practice riding. It went really well, however we chose one of the hottest days of summer to go, and we didn't last long.

 These two spent an incredible amount of time in the pool this summer. Toward the end of the summer we ended up being a "clothing optional" operation. They loved it. :)

 For whatever reason, we never made it down to the wading pool down at greenlake until last week.  We went a few days in a row and the boys had such a great time floating and splashing around.

Daniel was very kind and gave his brothers rides.

 Nothing beats a little poolside snack. 

Aaron learned to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" this summer. This is his goofy rendition.

 So long, summer! We had a wonderful time filled with water play, friends and lots of cool treats. Can't wait for another fun summer next year!

Bird Feeders

I have a pretty long list of activities to keep us busy this summer...problem is, we've been SOOO busy that we haven't made much of a dent in my list. I'll take that as a good thing. Here's one of the projects we did get to: bird feeders!

 It's so hard to get a good photo of all three of these boys, but here they are making the feeders. We kept some stale bread (the ends of the loaf, go figure), poked a hole in them and threaded a piece of twine through. Then spread some almond butter on and sprinkled birdseed over that, and voila! A completely edible bird feeder!

 Daniel was very meticulous with his seed sprinkling. 

We hung the bird feeders on the tree outside our kitchen window so we could all watch easily from the table.

 Our first visitor.

 I thought we had put the feeders far enough toward the ends of branches so that squirrels couldn't get them, but...

 Squirrels are tenacious little guys! This one kept running and jumping off the fence onto the bird feeder and would hang by his back feet trying to tear the bread off the string.

Within a few days, this was all that remained. It was a fun project, and super cheap and easy, so we'll definitely do it again. Even if we are just feeding the squirrels...