Starting it out RiGHt~

I love summer and having my kids at home. We get alot of cleaning done (always!), but we play alot to. Kimberly and Cameron have had summer jobs for the past couple of years so they aren't home much, but Halle is. The last couple of years, I have tried to do weekly "field trips" with the kids, at least with the ones that are at home. We've gone on picnics, hikes, to the zoo, to Lagoon, to the Lake to swim, fishing etc... I've tried to help them make memories and have fun during the summer, as well as teach them the principle of work. Halle and I made a list of things that we want to do this summer and are going to try and do one at least every other week (every week was setting too high of expectations for me). Last week we went shopping out in Provo. Halle had some money that she has been saving to buy some summer clothes and I thought that would be something fun for just her and I to go and do...so we did. We spent the day going in and out of stores in the Mall and she came home with several bags of goodies. She is quite the bargain shopper and really hit some awesome deals. She planned out what she wanted to get and didn't spend her money on other things. I was proud of her ability to get what she went out to get and not be enticed by things that she really couldn't afford or things that she "really didn't need or want". We went to Cafe Rio and got our lunch "to go" and then went to a park to enjoy it. We weren't there 10 minutes when this awful cloud blew over the top of us and threatened to dump its contents onto our picnic. So we packed up our lunch and went back to the car to enjoy it...we were going to enjoy it one way or the other. Halle had been eating her lunch when a piece of it got stuck up by a tooth that was "sort of loose". She couldn't eat the rest of her food and was really in alot of pain. After convincing her that the only way to make it quit hurting was to pull the tooth out (which she didn't want to do because it wasn't all that loose), she finally got it out and felt so much better. You would think by 12 years old that most of her baby teeth would be out, but she was late getting teeth and now she is really late loosing them. She has lost 3-4 in the last few weeks. But she isn't afraid to pull them herself. Our day turned out really fun and the weather cooperated. We had great roads both going to and coming home from Provo which pleased me 100%. Even though there were clouds and I kept thinking that any minute we were going to drive into a down pour, we were able to steer clear of any storm. Our first field trip for the summer was a hit and we can't wait for the next one.