Summer Events!

Our only travel this summer was in early June when we went to Arkansas for Hannah and Zane's wedding.  

We're missing Nathan (in Peru) and a few of the great-grandchildren 

all the girl cousins

After the wedding fun, we enjoyed some extended family time at the pool and in the backyard!

As soon as we arrived back in Knoxville, we got together with the OTHER side of the family to celebrate Liz's 85th birthday!  She makes 85 look fantastic!

The next big summer event (since we have no photos of the 4th of July) was a baby shower for Caleb and Meredith!  We had a very full house, and it was a lot of fun!

Here are a few more random photos from the summer of '24. 

National Champions!

Rocky learns to swim!

Baby #3 on the way!

Morning peaches

Fun times with Gran

Altogether for one glorious day on the water

Taking Melanie to S. Holston Lake

Terry ordered random orange flowers off the internet.  They grew like gangbusters!  

It may look like we're having fun, but we were burning up! Left before the first quarter was over. 

ALTA Conference

ALTA (Academic Language Therapy Association) is the group I am licensed through for dyslexia therapy.  I still feel like I have a lot to learn to be a better therapist, so I decided to attend the national conference in Little Rock.  Being at the conference was an interesting dynamic.  All the displays and conference sessions were directly applicable to what I do every day, so that was great, but I didn't really know anyone and had no one to hang out with.  I've discovered that educators (well, maybe just all of us) tend to hang around in groups (hey, some of these groups even had their own T-shirts, which does seem like an educator thing to me!), and I'm not enough of an extravert to really overcome that.  So evenings and most meals were just quiet, alone times.  I did take some pretty walks down by the river.  And I did make two new friends - one who hosts my favorite dyslexia podcast!  

The first evening, I got to have dinner with Casey Harrison, who co-hosts the podcast Together in Literacy, which is one of my favorites.  I hear her voice a lot when I'm walking and driving in the car, so it was so fun to chat in person!  

My other friend - an educator from Memphis.  We enjoyed hanging out together and probably would have done more, but her husband was also in town for business.  

All the rest of these photos are from walks along the Arkansas River.  There were lots of bridges and cool sculptures.   

Eclipse 2024

We had so much fun seeing the eclipse in 2017 (see this post), that I decided we'd see the next one in Arkansas if at all possible. Seven years went by much quicker than expected. You'd think with seven years to plan, we wouldn't have been trying to figure out where to view it from at the last minute! We settled on seeing it in Hardy, Arkansas, where they would have 4 minutes of totality.  We watched from the vacation home of Dale and Mary Beth Berry, friends from Knoxville.  

We stopped at a Sonic on our way to Hardy to try their new "Black-out" slush.  It looked an asphalt slushy, but it sure tasted good!

Hanging out and waiting for the magic on the banks of the Spring River

Ann and David had special T-shirts

Finally totality

A few magical moments of dusk in the middle of the day

On the way back to Tennessee, we decided to stop at Reelfoot Lake, where we'd never been.  Got a great campsite that had already been paid for by someone who viewed the eclipse and left.  

                                                    

We'll see if we make it to 2044!