The Summer in Pictures

Since school starts tomorrow, I guess today was the last official day of summer break. We've had an excellent summer, filled with a whole lot of fun and adventures. Besides the requisite activities (swimming lessons, snow cones, picnics, running through the sprinklers, etc.), we did most everything on our special list (the mental one I made, anyway) along with some spontaneous fun, and I feel like it was a total success. And the best way to remember it is through a bombardment of pictures, I think.

Memorial Day hike
not technically summer break, I guess, but I just loved that Anna
chose sitting in the middle of the path for her portrait

The first thing we did once school was out, of course, was go ice skating. Anna has been begging to go for months and months and probably years, but it was strangely more difficult than she imagined and she kind of hated it. I think it was still fun that we went in May.

Then there was that time Anna played in a box for an evening...

It was Anna's idea to have a Country Week, where we learned about one country each day. We decided to make a food from each country at lunch, discuss what we learned, and listen to classical and popular music from all these different places. We loved it! We'll totally do that again. We came away with some foods we will certainly make again (baked ham and egg cups from Australia) and some we will not (pineapple rice pudding from Egypt), but I'm glad to know about it now.

Anna decided to do some writing one day on her white board from school and couldn't have picked a better phrase to accidentally immortalize with permanent marker.

THE PLANETARIUM

We also went to Mars...

... and the moon. That's me in the space suit.

And played with clouds.

While the planetarium was super fun in itself, this was the real reason we went: to see the movie Flight of the Butterflies. It was fantastic and magical. Go see it today. Seriously. We all LOVED it.

Waiting for the Stadium of Fire to start.

Kind of a random pic, but it's the only one I took that day. I went with my sister down to Scofield where a bunch of us met up with the author of a historical fiction novel we all read before coming. It was about the mine disaster that happened there in 1900, and the author took us on a tour of the cemetery and the old school where there is an exhibit about the disaster. It was super fascinating to get the historical perspective of it all and fun to hear about the process from the author. The mine is actually up the canyon to the right, past that small group of white buildings, if you're interested.

CAMPING

We played an obscene amount of games, which I think makes the best kind of camping trip.

LAGOON

This was fun. Anna earned money all summer to put towards a ticket to Lagoon. We went with her Aunt Natalie and had a great time. Now, I have mixed feelings about Lagoon. Kind of a love/hate thing. It's better now, now that I've faced many of my fears there (I was terrified of roller coasters up until about the age of 14), but there are still some things I hate. Like the Wild Mouse. It just makes me angry, getting wrenched around the whole time, and I hadn't been on it recently enough to remember just how much I hate it.

But I love me some bumper cars. (Anna's in the yellow car at the back.)

The sky ride is pleasant at times but paralyzingly scary if you really think about it.

Most think it's an easy ride, one for lightweights, but it still kind of freaks me out sometimes. Look how high we are! I don't have a problem with heights, if I'm behind a guard rail made of steel or something. But one small wiggle and I could slip right through the safety bars on this thing. If that were to happen, I'd try to aim for a tree because that seems like it'd be the softest and nearest landing/something to break my fall, but you never know. It could be straight down into the shallow fountain.

One of the favorite rides, the Dinosaur Drop was ridden several times. This is
like a mini version of The Rocket and much more my speed.

This was taken at a happy moment before I nearly died of the dizzying vomits on the teacups and before my legitimate lifetime ban on the world's worst ride. Nothing actually came up, but I had to work hard to keep it down. I guess I've officially reached old age.

I feel like I have to explain. There are some rides and roller coasters I like and some I like a lot, so I'm not a total scaredy cat. (I was a little terrified of Air Race, or whatever, with the airplanes that fly upside down, but I did it and enjoyed the thrill.) But there are some I will never do, like the catapult thing and the giant slingshot/swing thing. They are not for me.

I took this a few days ago on a shopping trip, and it just struck me how old Anna looks. Maybe it's the long hair and how elongated it seems to make her, but I feel like she's already 17.
Just in time for 2nd grade.