Last Post of Summer

This was our first summer living in our new house, and we had so much fun taking advantage of everything our neighborhood had to offer in the warmer weather months!  On Saturday mornings, we would wander out of our backyard to the Farmers Market and check out what the vendors had to offer that week.  Our favorite new addition this year was Winged Wonders and their awesome monarch butterflies!

And coming in a close second: the baby goats.

On Sunday nights, we would grill out on the deck and listen to the summer concert series going on at the park.  There were a lot of great performances, but our favorite had to be Trout Fishing in America over a picnic with Nana, Grandpa, and GG.  So. Much. Fun!

We spent many evenings over at the library, too, where Liam participated in his first summer reading program. The program offered a ton of events throughout the summer, and our favorite was definitely the Juggling Hoffmans!

Summer is full of fun, no doubt-- but it's also full of great food.  And Uncle Sam's summer garden is full of the best veggies around!  Liam and Joergen love to help Uncle Sam and Aunt Doreen prep the garden and plant seeds in the spring and tend to the garden all summer long (while snacking on copious amounts of green beans and grape tomatoes in the process!  They don't work for free, ya know!).  I felt like I won the lottery every time I picked up the boys at the end of the day and found a big bag of goodies from their garden waiting for us inside the door.

We can't talk about great summer food without talking about our fruit share from LFFC.  Joining their CSA has been such a fun adventure, and we always get a little excited for our Tuesday pick-ups at the "fruit house"!

Liam pitting cherries from LFFC

The boys love summertime at Aunt Doreen's and spend most of their time getting dirty in her yard.  In fact, I think that the amount of filth and sand in their laundry basket at the end of the week was pretty much proportional to the amount of fun they had that week.  And the better they would sleep at night!

Declan and Joergen, post-sidewalk chalk

The exception to the dirt rule is pool days, in which case the filth is just replaced by caked-on sunscreen.  I absolutely love getting Doreen's texts in the summer while I'm at work, because they almost always include fun pictures like these:

Liam, Raleigh, Brayden, Kaelyn, Allie, Emmy, and Joer

Liam, Em, Raleigh, and Kaelyn

BFFs!

For as much fun as they have during the day, the boys also love random summer evenings hanging out with neighbors and running around in their bare feet outside. And they especially love spending time with next-door neighbor and babysitter extraordinaire, Gina.

Perhaps the biggest news of summer, though, was Target.  Yes, Target.  The largest Target store on the east coast finally opened this summer, and it's in walking distance from our house.  This is both awesome and dangerous :)

But, mostly awesome.