Bumming around Boise.

I need to be better about taking pictures of the ordinary stuff we do around here.  Summer is time to teach my kids to work, sew, cook, clean, and weed.  It's also a time to be bored, to read, to take walks, bike, swim, go to the park, hike, make messes and bum around.  We did all of those things and more.  The most memorable visions of summer will always be the vacations.  But the transformative aspects of summer come in small moments, in routines, in just being(and learning) together.  There are no pictures to quantify these moments of growth.  They speak for themselves.  They are manifest when we send the kids back to school in the fall, excited for the newness of it all, prepared to meet challenges and experienced in the fundamental lessons that home life provides.  I love being a mom...but especially during the summer.  Here's to a good one!

My dad surprised us with a visit mid-summer and we took him on the river.  It's a Boise thing, I guess.

Grandma joined us a few weekends later.  Lucky us.

We went paddle-boating for the first time in years.

The weather cooperated for a leisurely trip to the Botanical Garden.

We also managed to take a trip to Wahooz, a trip earned two summers ago when we set(and achieved) some healthy eating goals.  It's encouraging to see that my kids are finally abandoning a sense of entitlement.  They were dying of thirst (it was 100 degrees the day we went) but they wouldn't let me fork out cash to buy a drink or two from the vending machine - they simply used the drinking fountain.  They played hard and all day, knowing that it would probably be another few years before we returned.  They gushed about how fun it was and how grateful they were that we went...I've got good kids.  And they're learning to be grateful, in spite of a world of entitlement.

                                                Oh, how I wish summer would never end.