Summertime Craziness

While most people, those outside of the homeschooling community, feel like summer is "boring" and can't wait for school to start again, we have actually experienced a surge in activities. Wow! It has been non-stop since the end of May.

Unfortunately, our summer started out on an awful note with the loss of one of our family pets. We had to make the call to euthanize one of our Akitas, Bitsie, who had cancer. We miss her but know that she is no longer in pain. Here is a picture of her before she took her turn for the worse.

The boys were very upset by this as she was our first big loss in our family. It took several weeks before we could even mention her name without a few watery eyes. :-(

I tried to make sure we kept busy to take our minds off of the loss, and the boys enjoyed the summer workshops that the Bass Pro Shops offered during the month of June. They completed all eight classes in order to collect the pin for each one--Plants & Insects, Hiking, Camping, Animal Identification, Fishing, Bird Watching, Shooting, and Archery.

Both boys also participated in a citizenship program at American Village (at right), a local living history attraction, where we were swept back to 1775 when America was preparing to declare its independence.

We also finished our long-term temporary* chicken run for our younger chickens which are in the transition phase of moving from the brooder to the coop with the big ladies. We are still working on a second coop and run for our Ameraucana chickens to move into as soon as possible. They should start laying some blue eggs for us in about 6 more weeks. Yea!

Staying cool in this atrocious Alabama heat is hard to do, but attending a homeschoolers' pool party, visiting a splash pad park, and taking a dip in a cold creek at a local nature preserve always helps! We found an awesome nature preserve that is practically in our backyard, and we never knew it. We spent an afternoon with other homeschoolers relaxing on the banks or in the shallows of the "creek" while the kids played on the natural water slide. Of course, the begging to return started nearly as soon as we left!

It's hard to imagine that we have had the perfect space for a family-size vegetable garden since we've lived here (right at 13 years), and we are just now getting around to it. We have all spent countless hours working in our first-ever vegetable garden--planting, tilling, watering, weeding--and are now waiting to reap our rewards. So far, we have only harvested a few sweet banana peppers, but we will soon have pickling cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, corn, okra, squash, green beans, eggplant, peas, numerous colored bell peppers, and--hopefully--some cantaloupe, watermelon, and sweet potatoes. Since it is our first garden, we couldn't really decide what we wanted to plant the most, so we just planted a little bit of everything!

We wrapped up the month with our annual family reunion on hubby's side, but most everyone couldn't make it this year. Sure will be glad when we see some relief to this economy crisis! It is really taking its toll on many, including us these days.

I'm sure it is not difficult to see why I haven't had time to sit down and blog lately. I hope to work that back into my routine as I enjoy taking a moment to share our adventures!

*long-term temporary = my idea of temporary and most other people's is not quite the same--seems like all of our temporary arrangements end up pretty much permanent! LOL!