Back-to-School Feast

Sunday we had our annual Back-to-school feast (you can read about feasts of the past here and  here).  I got overly ambitious this year and made little felt crowns for each of the boys.  They were actually pretty easy and the boys loved them!

On the menu was hamburgers, homemade fries, fresh fruit and veggies and raspberry lemonade.

We also introduced the theme for the school year: Choose The Right.

This covers so much that we are trying to work on... being kind to brothers, serving, being helpful, talking respectfully, etc.  Hopefully the constant reminder to CTR will help!

The boys were pretty excited for this yummy dinner and tradition and seem to be on board for the new school year theme.  Hopefully their excitement carries them through the school year.

The boys wore their crowns all night and even when we dropped William off at school the next day!

Yesterday we even got some new CTR rings and "Choose the Right" bands.  Everyone was pretty excited about them... and hopefully they prove to be a good reminder.  Here's hoping for a good school year and lots of good choices!

End of Summer Fun

We squeezed in a few more fun things before the summer ended.  We discovered a fun splash park in town (too bad we went on a cold morning!)

And there was a fun playground right next to it as well!

I love end of summer clearance items at Target.  I picked up this sprinkler ball for really cheap and the boys had a great time playing in the water out back.

They even learned that they could get the slide wet to make a slippery ride.

The boys have been missing the Oklahoma City zoo so we decided to check out a little wild animal park nearby.  I don't know if it was worth what they charged (about as much as our zoo in Oklahoma!) but it was fun and they had some really neat animals.  They had tons of babies--tiger, lion, lemur, zebra, cebu... all so cute!

 They had several tigers that were lounging about.  It seems that most of the time the OKC tigers would be hiding so it was fun to see them!

We have had such a fun summer.  The boys were great and helpful all summer long.  I was almost feeling sad that I had to send them back to school this week.  I say almost because something changed in the last few days... lots of teasing and screaming and wrestling.  I think it's safe to say that I am plenty ready to have the big boys in school now!

Summer Concert

It seems that there are always free concerts going on in the summer.  I always make plans to go... but we never follow through.  This year we finally made it happen and I'm so glad that we did!  We all had a great time!  It almost makes me sad that we didn't take advantage sooner.

Alexander is our little dancer and he really enjoyed shaking his booty.  (Everytime he gets up to dance he wiggles his bum and says "shake your booty, shake your booty"--it's pretty funny.) 

All that dancing wore him out and he needed a little rest before we ate.

 Once Rich showed up we grabbed some hotdogs for dinner and enjoyed the music.

A little while later they set out some hula hoops for the kids to play with.  I was super impressed by William's hula hooping skills!  He could go on and on and on!

James wasn't bad either!

It was a great summer night... the weather was perfect, the people watching was fun (like the old couple who kept coming up from the back of the park to dance in front of everyone!), and the music was great.  We will definitely make time for this activity in the future!

Olympics

While the summer Olympics are going on I wanted to make sure that we celebrated!  In addition to watching events during the day and evening we held a "Family Olympics".  I sort of threw it together last minute-ish but it turned out to be lots of fun!  After a nice healthy dinner we headed out back.  Rich had the boys warm up and stretch while I posted the signs of our events (which I had drawn while we finished eating!)

 First up was basketball.  Since we only have a little hoop we didn't play a full game of basketball... just had each boy take a shot.  Surprisingly they each made their first try!  These boys have some skills!

Next event: Fencing.

We have a plethora of light sabers at our house which is what we used for our swords.  The boys think they really know how to fence since they've played a fencing video game at the neighbor-boy's house.  They also think that it's super neat that Rich was on the fencing team (for 2 whole weeks) at Rick's. At the end of the night Jame's said that fencing was his favorite event.  Probably because he beat William!  Besides, he is a trained Jedi you know.

One of the best things about our new home is the jungle gym in the back--and it made a perfect venue for our third event: gymnastics.

William showed us his skills at hanging upside-down.

While James showed us how he could climb super fast.

And the boys loved doing their fancy jumps on the mini trampoline.

Here we have the team event.

Even Henry got in on the action.

Our last event at home was track--my personal favorite.

We held a few different track events.  First was a race from one end of the yard to the next.  On your mark.  Get set.  GO!

Alex was sad that he was so far behind the older boys so Rich came in and helped him finish.

And Henry brought up the rear.

And since Alex was so sad about coming in dead last we had a relay--the two older boys were a team and Alex got paired with Dad which evened things up pretty nicely!  The relay was such a hit that we did another one... and this time I was paired with Alex.

William was so fast that I still didn't get enough of a lead to help Alex win.

 
For our final event of the night we headed to the neighborhood pool.

Usually when we head to the pool in the evening we have it all to ourselves.  Unfortunately there were several people swimming that night!  We adjusted our events and instead of swimming we did "diving".  After watching the men's diving events the night before the boys loved showing off their fancy dives.

Apparently James learned some really awesome moves and learned how to jump out of the pool.  Or so it seems.

Don't you love William's expression?  He is really concentrating hard!

After returning home we got in our jammies and held our medal ceremony.  Every boy got a gold medal (which my mom had given to me last summer and I miraculously still knew their location),  we sang the National Anthem, and had a special treat before heading to bed.

The boys loved it so much--and the neighborhood boys were so impressed by their gold medals--that they did some more Olympic events the next day with their friends. That is what I call success.