Fourth of July

We started our Independence Day celebration with a little crafting. I made a flag decoration for our kitchen and the kids decorated wooden stars.

 

We did a little lesson plan on the American flag and Independence Day.  After the lesson, I asked the kids "Can you tell Daddy who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" They all thought about it, and then Clayton piped in..."ummm... Jeffer Michaleson?" We definitely had a good laugh about that.

 

We went to the Lake Bluff parade with our neighbors, Angie, Scott, Emily, and Braden.

 This is the crazy lady next to us that took, maybe 245,000 picture of her kids and the people she was with. She also stopped the parade at a few times for some of those pictures and proceeded to accost anyone handing out anything to personally hand out something to every one of her children.  Seriously, lady??!!?? She was so over-the-top, she seemed like an SNL character.

 

After the parade, we went to Westmoreland with my parents, Taylor, Jess, Kellan, and Makenna.

 

 

 

 

Then on to the fireworks!

 

I LOVE Austin's reaction to all the fireworks :)

 

 

VBS

All three kids went to the St Joseph VBS this year. They all came home singing all of the "Kingdom Rock" songs and with nothing but good things to say about their time there.

(The crying in this picture is not because of the camp, but because I had just taken off one of Austin's bandaids without his approval.)

10 Years!

Since we officially celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary on our Colorado trip a few weeks ago, we had a pretty low-key celebration on our actual day.  We went to Ravinia to see Darius Rucker. Despite getting rained on twice, it was a GREAT night!

First Bike ride at Independence Grove

Now that all the kids ride "big kid bikes", we thought we'd take our first family bike ride.  It was so cool to all be able to ride somewhere together. We only made it to Riverside park a few blocks away, but it's a start! 
A few weeks later, we drove the kids' bikes to Independence Grove and they got to ride the trails there.