Summer time activities

Here are some random pictures from summer.

One day I took some of our neighborhood friends to a really cool splash pad way across town - only to find that is was closed for maintenance - so we drove back and went to our usual splash pad - but about 15 minutes after getting there a cloud rolled in it started pouring.  I guess we didn't need a splash pad - the things we do for our kids.

We have 2 different lakes within about 20 minutes from our house.  We tried to go about once a week.  Our last trip though was epic.  The morning was nice and hot - and then about 11:30 - again - a cloud rolled in and things got crazy.  I mean crazy.  We had one big gust of wind that blew over our umbrella and all of our towels and life jackets away and as we (and everyone else) was chasing our stuff the rain and hail hit - hard.  The wind kept coming.  It was seriously like a hurricane - you couldn't stand up straight in it.  The wind was so bad it was blowing water from the lake and sand from the beach - it was so painful.  I think afterwards we saw that wind gusts got up to 75 mph.  It was really scary.  Brock and his friend Lincoln (that we brought with us)  took it upon themselves to help everyone at the beach and started helping everyone them carry their stuff to the pavilion we were all hiding under and then started chasing after things that had blown away.  It was pretty adorable.  With every big gust of wind and crash of thunder all the kids and babies would just scream.  We were there with my friend and her 5 kids including a 18  month old and a 4 month old  - our whole situation was so pathetic - Veronica and I couldn't help but just laugh the whole time.

We also went hiking or biking about once a week with a bunch of families in our ward.  We were quite a sight and actually got in trouble almost every place we went.  Apparently it makes every other adult in the world nervous to have 20 kids under 10 years old and only 4 adults.  We had several forest rangers called on us.  We always left feeling a little frustrated but also strengthened that we got to defend the family.

And of course Legos.

There was also a lot of running through the sprinklers (Maddie) playing Mine Craft (Brock, Noah and Megan), riding bikes to 7-11 for slurpees, several sleep overs, and one day I even took my kids to watch The Angry Bird Movie in the dollar theater.  And on the last day of summer the boys got to go with their friend to play unlimited laser tag.  not too shabby of a summer.