My Summer Blog Album Part II

Our mst recent field trip was to vitit a honey bee "farm". The kids got to see how the honey was made, from hive to the bottle. They got to stick their fingers in it and taste it and try the honeycome (my favorite part!).

Here is Jozie, Hannah, and Bob checking out the extractor (I think that's what it was called!). Jozie is keeping her fingers back so she doesn't get them caught in the machine! :)

Here the kids are checking out the bee polen. He collects it right at the hive off the bees legs and sells that too. They got to taste it too.

She got caught trying to sneek a taste! :)

Jozie and Hannah with mouths full of honeycome!

Jozie lost her 3rd tooth a couple of weeks ago! She said it kinda tickles and makes her talk funny!

We had the honor of having Heidi Holt as house gusts for a week. They had a concert at our church and one in a park in town. This is Heidi. Check out their website to see more about what they did while they were here and hear some of their music.

This is Nick. He is the little brother of a friend of mine from high school. He is the reason that they got in contact with us - he was also in the youth group at GTAG when John was the youth leader. He said he remembered me babysitting him with his sister sometimes when we were younger! Thanks for making me feel old, Nick! :)

Here is Luke, sporting his self done "Nick look"! While the band was here he took hair lessons from Nick, he set up a base guitar lesson with Bear Claw, and drum lessons with Crash - oh, and he thought Heidi was pretty cute! What a boy! :)


Here is Luke racing the waves in Ocean City, MD. The kids were pretty excited to get to swim in the ocean! It was a beautiful day and there were plenty of waves. I almost wish I would have gotten the kids wake boards, they looked really fun and "all the other kids had them"!

Jozie was a little hesitant at first - probably more overwhelmed. Though we swam plenty of times in Lake Superior, we never swam in Lake Superior with waves like this because if the waves were this big than that meant that it was WAY too cold to swim that day. She did eventually warm up to it though and ended up having as much fun as Luke did!

There were plenty of sand crabs to be had. You dig for them in the wet sand down by the water and they reminded me of HUGE bugs! They were pretty yucky but the kids thought it was great and kept bringing them to me up on the beach where I was trying to rest peacefully in the sun!

Here are the sand crabs! :P

Bob spent the day before the wedding with Levi, John, and Brian on the Potomac with the jet ski...

He had to remind them that he wasn't as young as they were (he's the one here trying to get onto the back of the jet ski!)

We went to Baltimore, MD one day and went Fort McHenry. It is the place where the National Anthem was first written. We love these kind of historical places and they are usually pretty cheap to get into! Here is Levi, Sami and the kids in one of the jail cells!

The kids found the map for the sight impaired and thought is was neat to see how blind people got to "see" the fort.

Luke and Uncle Levi tried out the cannon.
It didn't work...

There was a big storm coming so they had to take down their big flag and put out the "storm flag". It's just a smaller flag - and Bob got to fold the big one because he knew how. He thought it was a really neat experience.

Here is Luke trying to lift one of the big cannon balls - he never figured out that they were welded together! :) LOL
While we were in MD visiting Levi, we went to DC and spent the day at the Smithsonian. Here is Luke checkin' out an aircraft carrier at the National Museum of Air and Space.

We walked across the Mall and saw the Capital Building. Here is Bob, Sami, Jozie, and Luke. I took the picture so I didn't get to be in it. :) I'm pretty good at that!

Here is Luke holding some sort of a hissing cockroach at the Museum of Natural History. He got to see the dinosaurs too but we didn't get very good pictures of it. Bob said that everytime he tried to get a picture of the kids I got in it! He was right and NOBODY wants to see that in a picture!!! :)


You asked for more pictures of Levi's wedding so here they are. These are the mothers with the bridesmaids (wearing the dresses Jaclyn made) and the flowergirl - I think Jaclyn made her dress too.

I loved this picture of Levi and the kids! :) Luke looks just like him! :)


This is Levi and our dad with his best man and now brother-in-law, John, and Chris, his father-in-law.

I liked this picture of Levi. He looks like he is posing for some kind of commercial.






Jozie and I had a field trip to Buckley Homestead for Pioneer Days with other homeschoolers in our area. They had a great time and got to see what farm life was like in the early 1900's for kids as they did chores, helped with preparing a common meal - which we shared before we went home - and what a one room schoolhouse was like. It was a wonderful experience and very educational. It made us long for a simpler and slower paced life than the one we live now in NW IN so close to the hustle and bustle of Chicago...We would go back to that lifestyle in a heartbeat if it was possible! Most of the other kids you see in the pictures with her are in our homeschool group that we spend our time with and go on field trips with.


This concludes my Summer Blog Album! We have had a long and busy summer and it isn't even over yet!