busy busy

Summer is so nice, but hard to find the perfect balance of resting/relaxing & keeping busy with fun activities.

We do our best but just like the other 9 months of the year, we're heavier on the "busy" side.

For example:

1) I finally took time to update the girls' school memory books from this past year (organizing all their keepsakes, and filling out the yearly interview).

I love having their "signature", to watch how that changes year after year.

Kinda not fair that I have to do all the organizing, and they get to do the FUN part (answering the interview questions about themselves). :)

Sorting through a year's worth of papers (x3) and deciding what to keep and what to throw out is exhausting work.  Especially as a sentimental person, and as a scrapbooker.....I want to keep EVERYTHING.  



So mid-way through we took a break and: 

2) We made fabric friendship bracelets.

It was funny because at the time that I got all the materials out, the girls weren't really in the mood and Jesse could hear us from the other room:

"I don't WANT to make frienship bracelets!"

"Well, TOUGH! We're making them! So be friendly and get busy!"

:)

Once they saw me finish mine, they were more amenable to the idea and got into the spirit of making their own.

3) Our super friendly neighbors (who are the PERFECT people to live in a duplex with, if you have to live in a duplex) got married on the day Mariah got baptized.

We cleaned & decorated their porch to make for a festive homecoming.

I did a big poster with my high-tech, impossible-to-duplicate figurines:

I loved the doiley banner....I kind of want to make more of them and hang them around the house, just for fun.

The white crepe paper kind of ended up looking less like a wedding celebration and more like we were pulling a prank and toilet-papering this nice couple's porch. But I think they understood.

4) I instituted my second attempt at family journal-keeping. I'm not the best example with my own personal journal, but I'm trying.

I got the girls their own binders (those suckers are EXPENSIVE, so I have a feeling this go-round with journal keeping will last awhile, at least just so I can get my money's worth out of them).

We spent an afternoon decorating cover-pages for them.

In my mind, I saw us all laying on the living room floor together, a nice breeze coming through the window, for 10-15 minutes of un-interrupted quiet time, writing about our day and our thoughts and feelings, together.

So far though the journals have been written in sporadically, when each of the girls just happened to get the whim to want to do it. But there's a few more weeks of summer, during which I hope to try to get this to be more like I envisioned it. But if not, at least they're writing something.  Even if, as in Mallory's case, it's a made-up story about a turtle who broke his leg.  ??