Where did July go?

Holy flying months Batman? Where did July go? Realizing that this is the last week of July, yikes. Only 1 more month of summer vacation. Steph was out with the kids and hitting some of the back to school sales already...crazy!

Since the 4th of July recap, things have been fast and furious. We spent a great weekend at the Coaches Time Out conference in Vancouver. It was a great event (as always) and gave us a couple days on our own. It was refreshing to be driving in the car and be able to have a full conversation for more than 30 seconds :-)

The following weekend, I passed up my Sounders vs Chelsea tickets :-( for an awesome time with the Hope caravan in the West Seattle parade. Our new tradition of piling about 20 kids in the School Bus and handing out candy to the parade goers. This year SLHS was in front, followed by Hope Church, then us in the back. The cool thing was that Hope got 1st place in the "community" category, so we were really excited to be a part of it.

Spattered among the weeks have been Hope Softball games...a new adventure for me as I have not played softball since the 8-ballers back in 2001 when Maddie was just a little tyke. I had a lot of fun, and I think the girls enjoyed playing with friends, occassionally watching bits of the game, etc. Tradition was to always hit up DQ after the games with the team, so we all really liked that. As of today, we officially are done after a 3-2 loss in the playoffs. I managed to eek out a few hits here and there....and only tweak my hamstring a couple of time. I must be getting old!

This last week was a big milestone as Steph helped put on VBS at Hope. Her and Leighellen spearheaded the effort and did an AMAZING job coordinating the week. Over 150 kids and 50 volunteers were a part of the week. Steph led all the crafts and had a ton of cool ideas to pass along to the kids. Her creativity and organization skills were at their best.

Story of the month, and especially right now (literally) is the heat wave. We have had like 2 days with any measurable rain since June 1st....amazing. This week we are breaking records for the heat, with tomorrow supposedly flirting with 100!!! After that it "cools down" to around 90 over the weekend. As you can imagine, we have moved all our time at home to the basement, including sleeping. Not sure we could make it without it.

On the House front, there has been a lot of activity, but I am not going to write anything in case it might jinx it...All I can say is pray for some good mojo :-)

4th of July Recap

We kicked off our 4th of July early this year by heading out to Maggie Lake on Wednesday. We were excited to get out of town for an extended weekend...and enjoy some awesome Seattle weather (80+ degrees every day!) Fireworks were already going, as we had worked the previous days on striking a deal on our house (more on that later). After our routine stop at the Belfair Safeway for some initial food, we headed up the cabin...the girls and I immediately headed for the lake to cool down...and Josie too...she LOVES to swim. Thursday we headed into town, and worked our way over to Trophy Lake for lunch where we also met up with Bruce. While Steph and Sheryl headed to the store for the "official" grocery store trip, Bruce and I and the girls stayed at Trophy lake and went fishing. As I have showed a number of times, I really like fishing here. Since it was so hot, the fishing was a bit tougher than normal, but we still caught a few in just a couple hours...and the girls love being the netters. We caped the day off with more swimming and a BBQ.

On Friday, more of the same....woke up late, took a walk around the lake, and swam some more. Nana and Papa J came up on Friday to join the fun and after some "fix it" help around the cabin, my dad was out in the paddle boat fishing. I think he ended up catching about 4 fish over the weekend...maybe the same one multiple times :-)! Friday night we had a chance to sleep outside in the tent for the first time..great night for it with it being so hot. We woke up on Saturday raring to go. We headed down to Tahuya days, where they have a great 4th of July celebration. The last part of the slide show below has some great pics from the parade...it is a goofy parade, but the kids love it because it is like a 2nd halloween with all the candy they get.



We got back to the cabin, did some more fishing, swimming, and relaxing. Below is a little video I took of the resident Eagle, doing his own version of "Fishing" this was the 3rd time he came down....pretty cool to see them this close.



That night Bruce and I joined in on game with the neighbors that took about 4 hours...it is like a West Coast version of horseshoes...kinda complicated to explain, so I wont. After that we watched the fireworks for 2 hours...yes, 2 hours of a personal fireworks show. There are about 3-4 groups that go all out.

Sunday we had a small garage sale to sell some furniture, and then headed home. Oh, and we had to wait in the ferry line for 2 1/2 hours!! Yikes. Oh well, better than sitting in traffic. Another great 4th!!