Summer

I was just taking a walk with Rebecca last night, and we noticed lots of leaves on the path. She said it made her sad, and I understand. Though I love autumn, I always hate to see summer go. It's harder now that Rebecca is here in the summer and gone during the school year. Summers always seem too short!

I also have an annual guilt about summer - every year I feel like I didn't get enough done - like I wish for a do-over. At least this summer we didn't move twice! And we had a vacation - even if it was a teeny-tiny four-day weekend.

In June, we took a brief vacation to one of our favorite spots on earth - a place Rebecca calls "The Wood Between the Worlds" (a Narnia reference), and a place I just call "Our Spot." This year it did not disappoint. We got a great site and had great weather. Even got to watch a full moon over the lake, which is always nice.

From Wood Between the Worlds

From Wood Between the Worlds

From Wood Between the Worlds

We spent four wonderful days water-skiing and tubing

From Wood Between the Worlds

reading, chasing coons from our campsite, feeding a duck that came by every day, playing chess

From Wood Between the Worlds

playing with fire

From Wood Between the Worlds

making fairy houses for folks to find in the woods

From Wood Between the Worlds

and playing cards (looks like Caleb is enjoying a good hand of spades)

From Wood Between the Worlds

While there, we celebrated Nathan's birthday. Here he is trying to guess his gifts:

From Wood Between the Worlds

But he never guessed that we were sending him to Denver to visit his friend, Noah Smith! We actually have a neat video of his emotional reaction to that gift, but he has forbidden me to post it on the internet. If you ask me in person, I will be happy to show it to you, though.

We had such a good time that we had hoped to do it again later in the summer, but we just couldn't find a weekend that we were all available. Noah spent two weeks at camp TaPaWinGo, Caleb spent four weeks at Doe River Gorge, Nathan spent a week in Denver, and Rebecca had two weekends taken up with wedding photography. Noah and I went to Arkansas for a week, too. Before we knew it, the opportunities for camping were gone.

Caleb started public school at Bearden High School on August 12th. He rides his bike to school every day as it's just one mile away on the Greenbelt. The rest of us gloated a bit and didn't start our homeschool until August 22nd:

From

On August 15, we got a visit from the Rideouts, who we knew back before they met and married. Now they are missionaries in Niger here on furlough. We had a great time teaching all their kids to ski and just hanging out together.

From August 2013

From August 2013

Other than that, the big news of the summer was that Terry finished his fourth flip house. I won't post all the before/after pics here (I'm thinking of creating a FB page for him to feature those), but here is one:

From Grenada

We are blessed that it sold quickly for a good price. We had a big party here last weekend to celebrate its completion. He's now started on his fifth house.