What passes for summer

The weather here in the Pacific Northwest has been thumbing its nose at us, as well as the rest of the overheated country, apparently, by refusing to be warm and summery.  So when Shell said she was hosting a link-up of summer fun pictures, I figured there wasn’t much chance I could join in.

But then I started going back through my (enormous, a third-of-these-should-be-deleted) photo gallery, and found that we did, indeed have a fair bit of outdoor fun.  So here we go…

Since the weather was typically dry without being too warm, most of the time we passed on swimming and did afternoons at the nearby parks.

Both boys LOVE to swing:

It seemed like every weekend in July had a festival (or two), so we did a bunch of those, most notably the local Fourth of July parade and fair:

We took several road trips north of the border to “Auntie’s house”, which you can read more about here.  It’s only a two-hour drive, so the boys typically have a snooze on the way.

The last time we went, Sebastian and his cousin got to have their first backyard campfire, complete with s’mores and spending the night in the tent.  Most of the time my camera was charging in the house, but I did snap this horrible photo (of me-SP is cute) by the campfire:

Back at home, since one or the other of the boys is often napping, the awake one and I spend a lot of time just kicking around our yard waiting for the other to get up.

Once a week or so, the boys and I go to the farmer’s market.  We grab some fresh fruit to snack on and sometimes have an impromptu picnic.

So no big trip home to Michigan this year.  No cottage on a lake.  No ocean swimming.  But around here we do have mountains, and the four of us climbed to the top of one!  {Holy sore backs, Batman.  But the view was worth it!}

Not a bad summer after all.

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You can check out more summer fun photos here.