Everyone goes to school

My 15 years of having little people at home to take care of came to a close on September 5th.  It was a sad, but also very exciting day.  There is certainly plenty of mothering left to do between 2:20 and 9:30 every night and on weekends, but my daytime hours are so quiet-weird!

Labor Day

We did actually spend the morning laboring to get our house clean for the first week of school. Good job fam!  Then we went to Aaron's parents for BBQ hot dogs and marshmallows.  Bonus-Emily and Lillian and Charlotte were up from North Carolina for the weekend!

 

 

August...sigh

Well, August came and went and we all survived.  First week was so fun at the beach.  Then the second week our AC broke and we moved in with Aaron's parents.  We were so thankful we had somewhere to go-it was actually like another vacation which was awesome.

Lots of games, lots of playing and spoiling.  Jane even found a friend in a shell for a few days.

Field trip to Fredericksburg for school pics and Costco.  Andrew made a good choice to help carry his sister when she was sore.  Sister made a less good choice when her orange shirted brother dared her to eat the whole bunch of bananas (that's seven bananas folks!!) and before her mother even realized what was really going on, she had eaten 6.  She didn't eat bananas for a few weeks after that.

Super fun family home evening, removing wasp hives from the church building and taking turns steering in the parking lot-ha!!

Then my back went out the day before the AC was fixed.  So I stayed in bed for an entire week and my children were wonderful helpers and didn't complain (too much) about being in this situation for their last days of summer.

Is it a princess or a unicorn? No-it should be but since we're talking about Jane, it's Flash.  This girl wants to get back to running SO bad.

After being stuck at home while I recovered we decided we had to do something fun the Saturday before school started. Aaron took the big boys to Kings Dominion and I headed to Chuck E Cheese with the rest of the littles.  Adam won 100 tickets on the spinny wheel and Jane out shot one of the dads in basketball.

Jane spending time with her friend:)

HAD to take a picture to document the day that Porter moved his massive Lego works out of the middle of the room, where they've been for years!  Andrew is an unusually patient brother and someday Porter will appreciate that.  And that was the end of August.

Virginia Beach

Listening to a time share spiel got us few magical days at Virginia Beach this summer.  It's been several years since we've been to a real beach.  All the kids are now old enough to be safe in the water-it was so weird!!  I could go in too!  Adam is a bit small for his age but he got right in there on the boogie boards with the big kids and Leo was even doing it toward the end.

We tried a family bike car thing which was pretty fun and Porter got all artsy in the sand.  This was just before the tide started coming in, so we spent the rest of the evening building and rebuilding a rebuilding barricade walls to protect Porter's sand friends.