seeing double

The family that lives right next door to us has 4 children that are very close in age to our girls. All the kids get along great, and we are fortunate to have such nice neighbors. Both the oldest and youngest girls in each of our families are quite the look-a-like sisters.

The big sisters ~ This is a picture of Alyssa and McKenzie back when the girls were 5. When I recently found this photo tucked away in a stack of old photos, I was struck by the incredible resemblance it bears to the two little sisters who can be found playing in our backyards most days:

The little sisters ~ Rebekah and Skylar, playing tea party yesterday. The girls love having constant playmates so close by!

Little Rock Collectors

The lakeshore is beautiful in the summer and we have not gotten there as much as we would like to this year. One of my favorite things about the lake is how it looks so cold and frigid in the winter, yet come summer, it is so welcoming and pretty blue. These pics I took yesterday do not do it justice. They came out very grey, I'm not sure if I didn't have the settings right for the time of day it was or what, but I was a little disappointed.

As nice as the lake is, we will be somewhere even more beautiful in just over a week. The girls are getting very excited!

After having a picnic dinner at the lake last night, they spent a good part of our time there collecting rocks. I don't understand the fascination, but everywhere we go, they want to bring bags of rocks home with us.






When all else fails, lasso the rocks.









I'm not sure what the pout is all about here, she was smiling seconds earlier. I think she just wanted me to know how hard she was working as she brought me the day's treasures.

last day of summer school

Yesterday was the girls' last day of Summer School. I had signed them up back in April, and then as our summer schedule seemed to be filling up too quickly, I almost cancelled, but it turned out to be a really good thing that we stuck with the plan. The girls each loved the two classes they took.

Alyssa took an awesome US History class, called From the Sugar Act to the Constitution. I love History, and it was very cool to see her so excited about this class! On their last day of class, the students performed a skit.

She played the role of horseman alerting the colonists of the British arrival in one scene, and Molly Pitcher in another.



I loved the props and signs they made!



Alyssa's History teacher was really nice, she made the class so fun for them! Alyssa's second class was a Public Speaking class, that she also loved. She worked on putting together both a prose and poetry piece, and got to create a funny infomercial with a group. It made her interested in joining a Forensics Team next year in Middle school, which we have come to find out that if we lived in just about any other part of the country, it would be called a Debate Club or team.



I thought Alyssa looked like Raggedy Ann in this costume. I don't have any summer school pics of the younger girls because their classes didn't have an open house on the last day like both of Alyssa's did. They came running up to me with the tie dyed shirts they made in Art and Rebekah's was still dripping wet with dye. Both Emma and Rebekah took an art class, Emma also had Problem Solving and Critical Thinking (a lot of Math games), and Rebekah had Getting Ready for Kindergarten. They were all great classes.

Sometimes I feel kind of mean for making them go to summer school, but we have always thought that summer is such an important time for the girls to take the German language stuff they learn all school year and apply it to English. This has been especially true for Rebekah this summer, throughout summer school and also just in our day to day activities. She has come home from summer school telling me about a story she heard that morning in English and tell me, "Guess what, I know this one in German too!" Learning a second language at such a young age has been an amazing opportunity for the girls, but from time to time, I get the feeling that small portions can get lost in translation. The classes that they take in the summer are much more laid back than regular school year work and especially as they have gotten older, the class options are a lot more fun. Best of all, I love seeing the girls making connections between the two languages as they experience school in a completely different setting.

MaD Camp

Music and Drama camp at church is always one of the best weeks of summer! Especially for Alyssa, she dreams about it all school year long! I'm grateful to all the people in our church who work so hard putting this camp together, many of whom take vacation from their regular job in order to do so. The message the kids prepared this year was Strong Enough, and they had an awesome week.

During the Sunday night service, all the kids who participated in the camp share what they learned. Alyssa signed up for Human Video for the first time this year, but was asked if she minded skipping that to be part of the Worship Team. She was so excited to be asked that she was almost crying as she told me about it later that day. She LOVES to sing!



All 3 of the kids who led worship were doing this for the first time ever, and they did great. I was very proud of Alyssa. She has always loved to sing, but until I saw her response to being asked about worship team, and how hard she practiced the songs all week, I didn't know that leading worship was a desire she had in her heart. If I can, I will try to add video later.



Thanks to their great teachers, both Alyssa and Emma learned SO MUCH during their instrument sessions! Alyssa came home each afternoon excited to practice and very challenged by the songs she was playing on her french horn, and Emma's piano playing improved so much over the week. Emma was constantly telling me, "Ms. Lisa said I am learning stuff I never learned before, and now I know lots more notes."



Emma had a blast during Human Video. For lack of any better way to describe it, Human Video is the kids dramatically acting out the message of a song. There's a lot of dancing and sometimes humor involved, and all the kids seem to love it.



This was Emma's first year being old enough to do MaD Camp. I was asked by a few of her teachers throughout the week if Emma is always such a "giggle machine." She loved every minute.



The highlight of Emma's week was being a "dead fish" in the scene of the song where they were re-enacting Jonah being spit out of the whale. I heard about it all.week.long. I wasn't sure what to expect from Emma's portrayal of a dead fish, and it was funny. I had to tell her afterwards that she didn't stop smiling and moving around enough to actually be dead, but she was absolutely the cutest and happiest dead fish I had ever seen.

Our great backyard campout

We camped out in our backyard last night, mostly because Rebekah wanted to.

The National Wildlife Federation hosts a Great American Backyard Campout every June, I think their goal is to encourage families to spend more time unplugged and outdoors, and every summer for the last couple of years we have been telling the girls we would do it. We try to take an actual camping trip each summer, but we have been out of town each time this NWF campout has come up, including this year. We won't have the chance this summer to go camping, so we figured we better jump at the opportunity of a Friday night where we had nothing else planned, to at least set up a tent in the backyard.

Rebekah did most of the help in getting the tent up, and she looked so cute laying down in the big, empty tent.



I read a statistic on the NWF website that said on average, kids get about 8 minutes of unstructured outdoor playtime each day. That's sad! I remember playing outside all day long when I was kid. And while it's not quite the same for our girls, I know they spend a lot more than 8 minutes a day outside.



After we ate dinner outside, Emma went over to a friend's house for a couple of hours to play games and roast marshmallows, while the rest of us did the same at home.



Alyssa and Rebekah kicked a ball around and played baseball for a while, it was fun to watch them play together.



When Emma got home the other girls were so excited to show her this toad. Emma was the only one who would touch it to attempt the capture, but I made them leave it where it was.


And because the evening wouldn't be complete without a story: I woke up about 3:30 am to hear Dave leaving the tent. I asked him where he was going, and he said he was going to the bathroom. I had a suspicion that he was not coming back to the tent because his pillow was tucked under his arm. Emma had crawled up onto the cot he was sleeping on, and she is the biggest bed hog ever {on a normal sized bed!} so I can't imagine he was getting any sleep with her next to him.

I had dozed off after he left, but remember waking up and noticing that he hadn't made it back. Just as I was drifting off to sleep again, I saw a light that seemed to span the length of the tent a couple of times, then go away. I was scared, but it was really brief, and I convinced myself I had imagined it in my half awake state. I had trouble falling back to sleep, and over the course of what I guess to be the next half hour it happened again, then one more time. I was beyond scared at this point, again being in and out of sleep making it feel even scarier than the situation warranted. I climbed up on Emma's cot and stood up, trying to see out of a skylight in the tent. I could not see anything or anyone and thought maybe the light was Dave. I considered calling out to him, but then the thought entered my mind that there's no better way to make the message clear to a would-be attacker that we were in there and vulnerable than to shout a man's name out into the darkness. I wasn't sure what to do, but knew I could not leave the girls in the tent, not even for a moment just to walk to the house. Our yard is not huge, but big-ish, and we were a good distance away from the house. I stayed next to Emma on the cot clutching a leather case that held a hunting knife. Finally as it started getting light, and I was sure not only that the danger had passed, but also that I was losing my sanity, I allowed myself to fall asleep.

Back in the house a couple hours later, Dave informed me that he had a sleepless night of checking on us after he couldn't tolerate the cot with Emma anymore. He didn't want to disturb us, so kept a safe distance away from the tent as he shined a light in to make sure we were all good. So, I was in the tent fearful for our lives, not sleeping, with Emma's body flung haphazardly across my legs and Dave was in the house, also not sleeping, carefully keeping watch over the tent...a great backyard campout for sure! Alyssa told me how soundly she slept in the tent, adding that she loved sleeping outside :-)

Before last night, I never understood why Dave has brought the hunting knife into our tent on every camping trip we've ever gone on {in my mind, children + sharp object = danger}. Unless we are camping, it's one of those items that I forget we even own, I have never used it for anything before. But if you're a crazy campsite stalker, I'll learn real fast if you attempt to get into our tent!

a happy girl and a funny note

Yesterday while Alyssa and Emma were busy with Music and Drama Camp at church, Rebekah was very happy to have a play date with some of her friends from school. It had been a few weeks since we had seen everyone, but all the kids seemed to pick up right where they left off at the end of the school year.



We've been re-arranging the girls' bedroom and furniture and I keep finding the funnest things. Alyssa loves to write little notes and leave them places throughout the house. She had apparently written this one to Rebekah before the start of last school year then tucked it away in her desk. It's the passage of big sister knowledge in pure Alyssa fashion. Brief and instructive, but sweet too.

4th of July Weekend

We drove to Southern Illinois for a wedding over 4th of July weekend. It was a long drive on mostly back roads, so it was very peaceful and we saw lots of wildlife along the way. We saw turtles and armadillos, and at one point a mother deer and her two babies stood in the middle of road just staring at us in confusion as to why we were on their road. It was sweet and reminded me of how our girls will watch from the sidewalk as an unfamiliar car drives down our cul de sac, immediately recognizing something that doesn't belong there.

As we were driving in parts of Missouri and Southern Illinois we saw a lot of flooding. We were approaching a bridge as I took this photo, and this line of trees opens up into vast farmland where right now the fields are completely underwater and the water is reaching well up into the tree branches. It was sad to see this knowing the impact it will have on the farmer's crops, and made me feel even worse for other places in the country where this same flooding has submerged people's homes rather than trees and fields in the flood waters.



We were on a mission to go see the "Liberty Bell of the West" which is a very old bell, older than the actual Liberty Bell, when all of a sudden the road ahead of us was under water. From a short stretch back Dave said he thought he saw water ahead, but most of the time that's just the sun creating a glare.



As we got closer though, we could easily see that we weren't going to be getting to the bell that day. The bird perched in the water fishing seemed pretty happy though. We love driving through places we've never been and seeing whatever happens to be there. In nearby Collinsville, we could have stopped at the world's largest ketchup bottle, but it didn't quite make the cut on our list of historically significant sites...to think it was within our reach and we passed it up.

We took a bit of an indirect route through St. Louis so we could have dinner at a restaurant Dave saw on the Travel Channel, Charlie Gitto's "On the Hill." It was amazing Italian food, birthplace of the toasted ravioli and in a very cool neighborhood. Sometimes the database that Dave keeps of interesting places/restaurants comes in handy!



As we were driving, I could see this bridge from a long distance back and I was hoping we were going to go over it. Sure enough we did, and we found the funnest thing on the other side...



Directly on the other side of the river, we had landed ourselves in Chester, Illinois. The home of Popeye!



It was such a cute little town and a pleasant surprise. There were cartoon scene murals painted on many of the buildings, and statues of the characters all around town.



A lot of the signs for the stores were just like this one, and all the store fronts were reminiscent of small town America. Everything was so cute, the people were so friendly and helpful. The town hosts a Popeye Picnic every September and we would give serious thought to bringing the girls there one year!

After a quick visit in Chester, we drove through the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail where we picked up a few bottles as gifts and a couple to donate to our Foundation's auction next year.



And of course, the whole reason we were in Southern Illinois was for Barry and Amy's wedding.



I loved the grasshopper greeting the guests from the rose petal as they signed the guestbook. It was a hot, hot day, but a beautiful wedding! Congratulations, Amy and Barry!



The next morning we went hiking in the nearby Shawnee National Forest. Dave had read ahead of time how nice the paved hiking trail was. As we got there, the trail we took was fine for walking on, and we saw some beautiful rocks and lookout points over the valley, but it was clearly not paved. We were actually thinking how nice it was ~ we didn't encounter a single other person on our whole hike. As we drove out of the park, we saw a different entrance, this time to a labeled hiking trail that was the paved one Dave had read about. Leave it to us to find the path less taken...



This was taken at Cave in Rock. We were on the Illinois side, but the shoot of land that you can see on the other side of the water in the back of the photo is Kentucky. They were running a car ferry back and forth and we thought it would have been fun to try it out, but we didn't have time. We wanted to be sure to get back to Sandwich in time for the fireworks...



With these little ladies. We have one little girl who loves the fireworks, and two others who could really do without the exploding, loud noises. I'll let you guess from the pics (even though they're blurry) who is who.

Loud fireworks and all, it was a perfect night.



I hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful weekend. Happy 4th of July!

Slow down, little girl, you are exceeding the speed limit!

Dave and I spent part of the 4th of July weekend in far Southern Illinois for a friend's wedding while the girls stayed with my parents. This morning, there was a Freedom Run that the girls ran in, and when we got home this evening they were so excited to tell us about it.

Rebekah ran in the Tot Trot which was essentially running from one side of the park, to a table of prizes on the opposite side. She came in 1st and was so happy with the water bottle and pinwheel prizes that she picked out. I had to laugh a little when she told me she won because she doesn't quite have the competitive drive that the older girls have. She is very content to be the baby and let her sisters work out all the competitive stuff. The lesson learned today: when a table of prizes is dangled in front of her, that's all the incentive she needs to run!

Emma ran her first race ever in the One Mile Fun Run. They blew the starting whistle and she, along with one of her friends shot off like a bullet. My parents were yelling out to her to slow down and pace herself. After seeing the race start, my mom tried to get over to the finish line as quickly as she could and she heard some people talking about a tiny kid who was following directly behind the police car that was monitoring the route, keeping it safe for all the runners. The tiny kid was Emma, and she won the race. Later my dad asked her if she led the whole way and she told him there was a boy who ran ahead of her briefly, but she explained, "I passed him then he ran right behind me for a little then he was waaaay behind me." My dad teased her the rest of the weekend that the police were going to issue her a speeding ticket. He was joking with all 3 girls that they were the fastest runners in Sandwich :-)



Alyssa ran in the 5K race. It was the second 5K she has ever run, and I probably said this very same thing about the first race she ever ran, but it was just something I wanted her to know she could finish. Maybe I'm just speaking from a point of my own weakness, but I think perseverance can be a tricky thing to teach a kid, and in a fun and safe environment like this, I knew it would be a great opportunity to show her she was strong enough to do something she may have had doubts about. She ended up finishing 2nd place in the 14 and under age group.

To explain the bottom photo ~ the girls are into taking silly pictures lately...whenever I ask them to pose for a pic, they will usually oblige (at least somewhat), then afterwards ask if they can take a silly one. I was so happy to hear the girl's excitement as they told us about the races, and know what a fun time they had while we were gone.

Meet Rex

Meet our newest fake pet, Rex:

He was purchased at the Missionette Mall at church for $6 in missionette money. His now proud owners, Alyssa, Emma and Rebekah were actually window shopping for an inflatable hamster at the time of his adoption. The hamster cost $8 and when all their money was counted up, and the total was only $6, he proved to be the most perfect hot pink inflatable dinosaur pet there ever was. They promptly gave him the very manly name of Rex, I think to compensate for his ultra feminine and almost blinding shade of pink skin. Just like the girls, he loves to swim at Grandma and Grandpa's house.



The pool is also where Rex happily takes all his baths. Don't let the bad rap blow up dinosaurs have gotten in the past confuse you, Rex has proven to be a very hygienic pet.



He doesn't even mind being shot in the neck by the kids and their water toys.



This picture has nothing to do with Rex. I just liked it.



Possibly Rex's favorite thing to do in the pool is to back float at the bottom of the slide, just waiting for one of the girls to slide down, dunking him under. Float over to the right a little bit, Buddy, you'll never get splashed hanging out next to the ladder all day.



See, the slide is a very fun place. Everyone enjoys it.



This is probably the most miserable picture I have of Emma. She couldn't get her goggles to fit the way she wanted them to. I'm not sure what Rex had to do with this either, but there must have been something.



Rex is definitely our favorite fake pet yet, at least so far this summer...I'm not sure how we ever managed without him.

The Sweetest Strawberries

Here are some photos from the day we went strawberry picking...


































The sweet rewards of a summer's worth of strawberries in our baskets. The girls seemed very content as we took the wagon ride back to the farmhouse, maybe it was just pure exhaustion, but it sure was fun! And we've been enjoying lots of delicious strawberry shortcake!