You know how if you blog all the time then you just do it all the time but if you stop then you start procrastinating?  Yeah, me too.  It is like all the stories build up and then it is too overwhelming to even think about recording them.  So I avoid my own blog and read everyone elses.

Summer has flown by.  I can’t believe we only have a week and a half of it left.  To be honest, I love summer.  I love having the kids around, I love the freedom. We don’t do summer camps.  I don’t plan activities.  We don’t do crafts constantly.  We have friends over one day a week, we go to the pool many days, the kids play inside and out.  We take bike rides.

We do one family-oriented vacation – as in we visit family so the lodging is free.  This summer, like many previous summers, we went to Michigan.  On the way we detoured to Fair Oaks Farm, a working dairy farm in Indiana that has a fabulous customer relations departments.  There was a climbing wall:

Chip went first.  I think this might be the apex of his climb.

BMilkClimb

Bird got the bell!

Mare did too:

The climbing was great, but what the girls really liked was the birthing barn:

Yep – they have stadium seating behind this and the visitors get to watch live births.  There are two stalls so there is usually a just born calf with its mama next to a laboring cow in the other stall.  It was awesome.

There were also more climbing/jumping/running opportunities, a pretty cool interactive movie about milk production, a museum and finally, a tour of their facility which was really interesting.   Oh yeah – and a string cheese maze:

We had fun.

Then next day we continued our journey towards Grandma’s, but stopped at The Dutch Village in Holland, Michigan.

We rode the swings:

We danced:

We dressed up:

And we fed the goats (Bird was really, really into the goats):

I think my kids might be a little bit Dutch:

Then we drove to GG’s.

To be continued…