Since school starts here in just a little over 36 hours, I thought I would reflect on our summer and all the fun things we did …….

Yep, lots and lots of fun things ….

I’m just sure …….

Ummmm………..

{{crickets chirping}}

OK, so apparently sitting around, listening to me kvetch about my heartburn and refusing to leave my air-conditioned house was perhaps not the greatest summer EVAH for my children.  But they survived.  And I’ve already promised that *next* summer, we will get up and do something.  Perhaps even leave the state. 

But only if the air conditioning in my van is working.

In the meantime, here are a photos of the few things we managed to do in 2010, regardless:

Perfect our ninja skills:

Hang with the hounds:

Despite having passes to the local amusement park, which means we can ride all the rides we want, and see all the shows we want, they decide that life is only worth living when we spend every spare dollar we can scrounge on the stupid midway games:

Win as many prizes as humanly possible, no matter how much it actually costs in the end, even if you have to resort to borrowing against future allowance money, but then you realize that now, you can’t buy that awesome key chain you saw in the gift shop, well, sweetie, that’s learning about money management the hard way, isn’t it:

Take said prizes and whack each other with them:

Eventually, ride the stupid Tilt-A-Whirl, just to shut mom up about spending all your money on those silly games:

It felt like we spent the majority of our summer waiting for this:

To become this:

To become this:

Until at long last:

We had lift-off!

In the meantime, I got really big:

But finally, all that heartburn paid off:

Took the kids to the Science Museum:

Let them enjoy a few back-to-school parties:

And then pretty much spent our life savings on back to school supplies:

How families with eight or nine kids can afford to do it is beyond me …….

And that’s pretty much it.  Kendrie started tae kwon do (sp?) last week and its stinking adorable.  Hopefully I’ll get pictures of that soon ….. just learning to tie the belt properly took me three days …. Kendrie has “Meet Your Teacher” tomorrow, Kellen starts football Friday, and Brayden is one of the yearbook staff in charge of candid photos of the first day back to school.   While I’m thrilled they are all finding activities to try and learn, I must say as a scrapbooker, that wreaks havoc with my tradition of first-morning-back-to-school photos ….. they have to be in three different places at three different times, up to an hour apart. 

Guess this will be the year I have to photoshop a kid or two into the family picture, right?