June 2023 in review

It is June 23 and I’m just now doing anything with this post. That all by itself tells you what my June is like. But, continuing on…

I’m actually going to split up June slightly different from usual, instead of trying to stick to as close as possible to 1-7, I’m going to break it up by the flow of the month for us, which means the first few days were back on the May 2023 in review, and I’m starting once we’re back from vacation.

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June week 1

The first week of June is started by the bottom picture, we hosted pool day for our co-op, and my boys wanted to make sure I got a picture of everyone canon balling together. And by everyone, I mean whoever they could shoehorn into this after people had started leaving. There were a lot of people who were talking with me about Batman leaving, and I just don’t want to talk about it.

The boys are team captains for our church’s VBS, Batman is a blue team captain, you can see him in his color regalia, I had to get a picture of him in the tutu, and Superman is the yellow team captain, and he’s been having fun with his yellow ball cap, which led to some weird pictures.

We use our toaster oven ALL the time, but no one remembers to clear out all the crumbs that fall into the bottom until there is smoke or fire, so of course when it started smoking when I cooked some bagel bites, I had to get a picture complete with the kids saying, “Mom you don’t need a picture of that!” Yes children I do, I really do.

We played a round of Shadows of Brimstone one day, which was fun, but I’m gonna be honest, I don’t really remember much more of the week.

Books read:

• Honestly, I reread a bunch of the Timeless Fairytales from last month because I wanted something easy
• Jabberwock’s Curse– ooohhh, she got a new cover from when it was first released, that is so pretty
• Jabberwock’s Champion– I got to betaread this, and I loved the sequel and thought the new characters were interesting

Games played:

• Shadows of Brimstone– like I mentioned up above
• My Dwarves Fly- sadly out of print
• Munchkin
• Camel Up

Week 2

I didn’t get a lot of pictures of my kids at camp, as a matter of fact, most of the pictures I took were of the group in general so I could share them with others. So here are my four pictures to share, AND some fun memories.

We got to church at 10:00 with the plan of leaving at 10:30, but at 10:30 we didn’t have our second bus. Time passed, and more time passed, and we found out our second bus was behind a broken down bus and they were waiting for a tow truck to come so they could move our bus. Finally they decided to send bus 1 on, just as we made that decision we heard bus 2 was on its way. We sent bus 1 on, and the theory was we split it up and wouldn’t overwhelm the fast food places we intended to stop at with 100 teens and adults.

However, after about an hour we found bus 1 pulled over on the side of the road, they had a flat tire. They were waiting for a tow truck to come with a jack large enough to change the tire. So, our bus turned around to the nearby town for lunch, dropped us off, then went back for bus 2. We were all fascinated to discover the Chic-Fil-A we stopped at had robots to deliver your order. I took several videos of it. After another hour and a half the bus was fixed and we headed to camp.

We were greeted by the captains all decked out in their color outfits, and you can see Superman and Batman as they greeted everyone. The Big Bird costume was insanely hot I heard, not surprising considering it was over 100 all week long.

Camp overall was good, the food was not, and there were some very fun games we played and the message were great, I have lots of notes I took.

Each night had a theme, and Wednesday’s theme was Christmas in July, with the picture of Batman in that hideous Christmas sweater someone loaned him.

And then the final picture is of the “Outside worship team,” the worship music is really loud, so there was a group of us that would sing outside and do all the motions from back when the kids were young. It was quite tiring.

Oh! And I forgot to say I came home from camp sick wich a rather annoying summer cold, or that’s what I’m going to classify it as, I was stuffy and allergy medicine was doing nothing for it, and just generally felt blah. But, I didn’t have a fever, while I was stuffy it wasn’t seeming like an infection, so it’s weird. Oh and the cough I had, the cough I had was terrible.

Books read:

• I was at camp, so I continued with odds and ends of the Timeless Fairy Tales
• Pocket Pair– while I like rom-coms, I’m growing annoyed with the current trend of so much description of the female gaze, “OMG he’s so hot, did you see his abs? The guns on his arms,” blah blah blah.

Games played:

• Civitas– I love this game so much
• Uno– they had a tournament there which my kids participated in
• Code Names– another tournament at camp
• Harry Potter Battle for Hogwarts– huh, I thought I’d written a review of this, but we tried a massive game where you fought all of the villains in book order, with each villain from the book, towards the end it was way too easy, so we’re brainstorming how to try that again but where we kept the challenge of later games (later games get really hard)

Week 3

Wow, this was a busier week than I realized as I started putting these pictures together.

I made some Bahaman sweet bread, which was a very solid bread, and I wish the recipe I had actually gave me a cook time or temperature because my bread wouldn’t have been burned on top.

Superman FINALLY got his cast off, yes from the injury in July 2022. He also got his braces off, so it was a momentous week for him.

I know that picture of trimmed brush doesn’t mean anything to you, but to me it’s another change.

Prior to it being trimmed back to pretty much nothing because of electric work, that was an 8-foot-tall bush, maybe 10 feet, and it was around 10 feet wide. Here’s the magical part, it was kind of hollow in the middle because there was an electric meter in there, so the kids could crawl under the bush and there was a place they could hide in. It was pretty amazing. But now it’s almost all gone.

We played a couple of games, one of which I had never played before, Destinies, which was an interesting game.

And then the final picture is from our Parking Team lunch, all of use served together on the parking team (you’ve seen pictures of the kids serving on it), and we closed down that ministry at the end of May because two of the members are moving and without replacements it was not safe to keep doing it, and no matter how we asked for help, we weren’t getting it. It was a fun lunch together, and I’ll miss the ministry, but I won’t miss how insanely hot and sweaty it was to be outside for a couple of hours on the blacktop.

Books Read:

• After finishing the Timeless Fairy Tales I read the Apprentice Enchantress series again, more because I wanted to finish the storyline, and then I’m thinking through how I would organize it to read the books in chronological order
• Ummm I feel like I read something else, but I can’t remember

Games played:

• Destinies– Batman bought this, and he’s been playing it a bunch with Superman, and then we played it once together
• Cancellation Hearts

June Week 4

Ahhhh, time is flying way too much!

This was club week, so the kids were gone all day and I had a quiet house. While they were gone I did a bunch of behind the scenes work on my blog, which meant I was going through and deleting a bunch of posts that are useless (old Science Sunday posts that essentially said, “Ack life crazy, link here and I’ll do something later” I didn’t add in something later) or just weird posts that didn’t do anything. Then I’m working on better organizing all of the memory-type posts. I don’t want to completely delete them, but I also don’t need a post that is like two sentences and a random picture saying, “Look at how cute my kids are!” So, I’m combining some of those into an uber post of memories, and copying the comments into a word file so I can remember what people said (and in some cases I’m adding in the comments into the newly combined post).

Then the kids would come home and tell me stories about how clubs went, “Oh my goodness we had a foam canon, it was so much fun” (bottom center) “The foam was waist deep!” “We did water balloons today,” more and more stories about friends.

Then on Thursday I got a text from Superman saying, I’m going to be Big Bird this afternoon if you want a picture of me and the cousins together come up to church, so I did and I forced all the cousins to get a picture. I also got a picture from my friend who made her kids take a picture with Superman in the Big Bird costume. I love all of these pictures. So much.

That same night the cousins came over to spend the night, but the youngest cousin was too young to go to VBS, so I babysat her until everyone was home, and so I got that awesome selfie together.

As we were watching a movie together, or more I was kind of watching the movie and she was playing, I got a phone call with, “Your dog is at our house, would you like to come get her?” It was near enough I thought I could just run over there with no shoes on.

That was a mistake, however the dog thought it was the most awesome trip ever, and wasn’t this so much fun?

No, no it was not.

Eventually all the cousins were there and they had fun playing Minecraft together, which is the bottom right picture, and eventually I sent them to bed after the four year old managed to steal some of the Artist’s coffee.

Oops.

The next day was Batman’s last gaming session before heading off to the army, so I snagged a quick picture of the chaos that is 11 players.

All in all a good week.

I lost my notebook where I’ve been recording what I read and what games I played, so I don’t really remember, even though it is literally only a day or so later. Go figure.

Okay, it’s 11:20, and I may have eaten too much ice cream, and so I’m getting a headache.