Summer Bucket List, Week 4

We have a Summer Bucket List, thanks to Kelly over at Little Wonders' Days.  This is simply a list of fun things we want to do or accomplish this summer.  We just completed our fourth full week of summer.  To review our previous weeks go here, here, and here.  This week was a full week of summer adventure.  We checked off bucket list items left and right and had a lot of fun!


1.  Visit 10 parks to play and picnic:  Friday between a couple of other activities we took a break and visited Q Pond's playground and also picnicked on string cheese, lunchmeat, grapes, munchies mix, and water.  The playground is an old-school playground.  The metal slide was too hot, but the boys climbed on the jungle gym and tractor tire, played on the swing, spun on the merry-go-round, and bounced on the bouncy platform.  Braedon led his brothers on a 'hike' through the short trail.


3.  Fishing:  Since I am late and writing this on Monday, I should probably not include yesterday's activities, but I'm going to anyway...  Yesterday we went to a family birthday party at East Lake.  The party included fishing and a short boat trip around the lake in a fishing boat.  We didn't catch many fish, but had fun practicing our technique.  And Colby pointed out this was the first time he had ridden in a boat.  Hmmm, I guess it is.  Yay!


12.  Library activities:  It seems we lived at the library this week.  But you know that wouldn't bother me one little bit.  This was our library's 100 year celebration, so the librarians had big plans for various ages throughout the week.  Monday we watched Gnomeo and Juliet as the free movie in the children's library.  Thursday we were excited to see the magician as part of their summer story hour series.  It was the same magician as last year, but he is quite entertaining.  Friday the boys had their caricatures drawn by an artist brought into the library.  He had several backgrounds for the kids to choose from and then sketched their heads and faces onto the body/background they chose.  We also started working on our library reading programs.  The older two get to enter their names for weekly prizes once for every book they read.  Brody gets a free book for every ten books that are read to him.  We'll be back to the library at least once this week for story hour's balloon artist.


24.  Go on a hike:  We hiked around Grade Lake on Monday.  This is a 2 mile trail, with the trail on the back-side of the lake through the woods.  Colby and Brody had walked this with me last summer while Braedon was in summer school.  This was Braedon's first time on this trail.  It was misting, windy, and chilly on the day we hiked, but we didn't feel any of that in the trees.  I learned that Braedon can identify deer tracks as he found several on our hike.  The path has wild black raspberries nearly throughout.  They weren't quite ripe, but we may go back this week and see if we can pick some.  There were also mulberries, but the berries I found were on the ground.  The boys refused to taste them from the ground, even though they were whole berries, in perfect shape.  The trees appeared to be too tall to pick from.  We had packed a lunch of sandwiches, trail mix, and water into a backpack and took turns carrying it.  


25.  Go to a movie as a family:  Wednesday our local theater offered two matinees of Kung Fu Panda 2.  Following our hike, we caught the 2:00 showing.  I love when we can go to the local theater.  It's cheaper than the bigger theaters in other towns.  The couple who runs it worked to renovate it a few years ago and the money for admission and concessions is going to a local business, not a chain.  It only has one screen, but the seating is great.  I saw several other families enjoying the show and I know there were others that came to the 10:00 showing as well.  So glad this is available to us.


(38.  Family Pictures by Jamie were scheduled for Saturday at East Lake, but we got rained out.  This may not be rescheduled until the end of summer.  Disappointed, but necessary when we had torrential rains and lightning.)


Other things we did that were not on the original list:
*Volunteering:  Colby, Brody, and I cleaned up after the youth rodeo as a cub scout service project last Sunday.  
*We had friends over last Sunday.  Ron had friends over to paintball.  Some of them brought their kids to entertain our kids.  Fun!
*Ron has gone in with a group of friends to purchase season tickets to the Iowa Raceway in Newton.  Three of his buddies couldn't attend Friday's race, so he took all three boys with him.  He sent me some pictures of Brody falling asleep halfway through the second race.  He was sitting on Ron's lap with the noise reduction headphones on and just drifted off and slept through the rest of the race.


Who knows what this week will bring for us.  The first part of the week I'm going to try to get some housework done that I've been neglecting.  So we will try to get some of those 'around the house' bucket list items checked off.  Thursday and Friday look full of fun in town and then we are into the big holiday weekend.  Woo Hoo!