Summer Bucket List

 

At the beginning of the summer Emma put together a Bucket List and hung it up on the fridge. She had some great ideas on there and we did our best to get to all of them. Clearly our best was short of perfect this year -  we had many un-crossed-off items on the page but we had fun along the way. Frankly, this summer was so dang hot we didn't really feel like doing a lot of them. A picnic dinner when it's 105 degrees? No thanks! 

The stuff we did:

Make ice cream, go camping, take popsicles to all the kids in the neighborhood, have a sleepover, tie dye shirts. have a breakfast cookout, play night games, watch a backyard movie, paint and hide rocks, build a fort, take a road trip, hold Emma's Book 3 recital, make s'mores, and spend a day at Aspen Grove.

The stuff we need to try again next year:

Go fishing, go fishing for crawdads, have a picnic dinner, host a game night, fly a kite, go to a drive-in movie, have a water balloon fight, hike to a lake, go stargazing, and play mini-golf. 

I guess we did more than we did not do, but I'm still wondering why we couldn't pull off something as simple as stargazing. Probably we were too busy staying inside and trying to not melt. Also, the stars don't come out until really late in the summertime. So phooey, we did our best and will remake the list next year. 

It truly seemed like this summer wasn't ever going to end, especially when you accept that September will also be hot and the cool weather will not come until school has been in session for more than a month. But like all things do, summer did indeed finally end.  I don't think there was much to the summer that I didn't blog about already, but as I was going through my photos I decided to put a few stragglers from the summer here just to remember some of the other little details.

One thing that I will not miss from the summer is taking care of Waterhaven Pool. I was the official Certified Pool Operator and I got Romney the job of taking care of all the chemicals over the summer. It wasn't a hard job but it was a little tedious. The bigger issue was having a broken boiler for the entire summer, having people be grumpy about a cold pool, having to contact repair people over and over again...it was stressful. Here's a lovely shot of me wearing protective gear while replacing the pool acid. It sums up my pool feelings pretty well. I'm hoping very much that next summer is better with much more swimming otherwise we might jump ship on the pool membership so to speak.

Totally not going to go over every detail but we got many visits from hawks this year. It was always alarming and quite exhilarating actually to discover a large bird scoping out my little chickens and scaring it away and throwing things at it and even making the neighbors wonder if you're okay while you yell things like "Get OUT of here! Just GO AWAY! Leave us ALONE!!" That made me laugh to think of what the neighbors might be thinking as I hollered those words. Also once the hawk got stuck in the old coop area and I tried to capture some photos of it that didn't turn out well. What did turn out well was having these close encounters without losing any of our chickens to its appetite. We still have all 8 chickens who are getting along so well now even when one is limping. They spent a lot of the summer outside of their coop and run which made for some very interesting egg-hunts, and I'm sure that there are eggs hidden here and there in the yard even now. Now that we've had three or four visits from the hawk, even shooing chickens into the coop as the hawk was literally swooping for them, our chicks are spending much more time under their roof.

Sunburns happened. The girls went to youth conference with our church youth at Bear Lake and I actually don't really have photos except that Emma got horribly sunburned. They had a great time though. Hmm. I really should track down more pictures.

We even got a brief visit from the Seattle Romneys and enjoyed dinner with them at Cubby's and a little time for Rosey and Emma to hang out. We always love time with the Seattleites and wish we could see them more!

So I'm here to tell you that we officially survived summer. We did not shrivel up or melt or evaporate even though pretty much every moment it felt like we were going to. We had fun. It was really busy actually - I can't tell if it was abnormally busy and hectic like it felt or if it was normal and only felt busy because of how it compared to the totally empty Covid summer last year. Who knows. All I know is....we made it.