The Roses: This Summer

We've had a pretty great summer! With just enough down time, and just enough fun time!

After little miss graduated Kinder, we prepared for a BIG trip to KY to visit my best friend, and her parents (who are like second parents to me.)

Believe it or not, I wrote a whole long blog post about it, and then I deleted it.

There's really not much on earth more frustrating than that... so just believe me when I say we had a GREAT trip and we cant wait to go back!!!

-We rolled back into town the day of my sisters Rehearsal dinner, Probably not on the top of the list of things for the matron of honor to do, but I okayed it with the bride and, Praise God, we made it home right on time!!

It was quite a lovely wedding, I must say.

We had a blast!!!

and these guys clean up pretty darn well. ;)

-We celebrated Fathers Day!

They really DO have the greatest Daddy ever.

-We've eaten entirely too many snow cones....

-We took a day trip to Abilene just for fun!

We went to the splash park

(hello San Angelo.. why don't we have one of these?!?!)

and of course, The Zoo... Our plan was to go to the museum, but it ended up being closed, so we whipped back over to the zoo. We only had about an hour and a half before they closed, so It was a sign of things a changin' that we made it through the zoo in that amount of time. It is a small zoo, but with little ones, it was always a half a day trip for us.

-My MIL wanted to take the kids to NM to visit her sister, so I planned a camping trip for Nat and I. I know, not the most relaxing thing to plan to do when you have no kids; but, we really have been wanting to go camping, so we saw it as an opportunity to trial such a thing with no kids.

PLUS,

I married the most fantastic fella who did everything in his power to make the trip fun and relaxing for me.

He cooked every single meal over an open fire… and let me just say, he's hired! Seriously, I may or may not have tried everything in my power to figure out how to build an open pit for him to cook over a fire every night.

Ha!

Then reality kicked in and I remembered he works waaay too many hours in a day to come home and cook me dinner every night. ;)

Really tho, he would. I would be the one to have to put a stop to it.

I am super glad we decided to do this first round without the kids.. we came away with lots of great ideas!!

we went on a lot of bike rides!

and a few hikes.

We fished.

We tubed down the llano river.

That was heavenly… It really was too hot to tent camp. The only way we could get relief was in the water.

It was lovely!

…and I got little teaser photos as such.

The kids had a great time on their little get away. Aunt Shirley "lives in a hotel" aka.. an apartment that has a really cool pool!

On our last day before we headed home, we made a little detour and went to Fredericksburg.

We just walked around and enjoyed some time together.

-We celebrated the 4th of July with the Roses. We had a great bbq and a great time together!

-My children have officially grown gills this summer! We have done SO much swimming and I am super excited that we have approximately 2.5 kids that are good swimmers! Payton has really gotten brave and is doing wonderful! Stetson is at a point of sometimes being brave and doing great.. sometimes still depending on his floatie. I think by next summer we will be outta the red zone, and swimming will be a little more enjoyable for this mama. ;)