School's Out For Summer!

To celebrate the beginning of summer break, we decided to hit up Dairy Queen on Daniel's last day of school. 

I think Carter liked it...

After that, we took as many opportunities as we could to enjoy being outside. The park was a favorite haunt...

... and we took advantage of all the beautiful hiking spots in our little part of Colorado.

There are lots of pretty flowers and plants!

This particular hike was at Gateway Mesa Open Space.

Pretty, right? We also hiked Castle Rock, because duh!

This is one of my favorite photos of the kids together...

Carter gets better and better every time we hike. He was such a trooper!

He also found a nice little seat for himself on the way up.

And Aubrey and I got this selfie. We're so cool.

At the top of the hill (mountain?), the kids did some good rock scrambling.

And Daniel made this fun little animation.

The weather did get hot, of course, so we also had to find ways to cool down. We tried water balloons, but the kids couldn't really throw them hard enough to break them on people. Oh well, it was still cute.

We also used our fun sprinkler. That thing has lasted much longer than I expected it would, haha.

On a note completely unrelated to pretty much anything, we also got to watch some adorable twin babies for our friends, and I swooned with the cuteness that was Aubrey and Carter with the babies. So I had to share these photos.

Anyway, moving on. The kids have loved being close to Nana and Papa, and summer allowed us to  visit them more often. 

On one particular visit, Aubrey got a little carried away picking flowers for Nana... It's so cute though!

Aubrey also took swimming lessons, and she really improved! She also got over a lot of her fears.

And finally, for this blog post at least, we enjoyed a fun visit from our friends Vanessa and Kyle, who live in Alabama, which is much too far away. Our kids got along really well! I kind of failed at taking photos while they were here, but I did manage to get a few when we went to Garden of the Gods.

We even got a photo of our whole family!

I also had to take advantage of being there again to recreate one of my favorite photos of Carter. Here's the new one followed by the original.

Awww, why do they have to grow up??

Anyway, our lovely outing ended with Carter having a major, awful, disgusting blowout that required me to change his clothes. Thankfully, Vanessa had extra clothes in her car. Because I didn't. Anyway, I guess the whole ordeal tuckered him out, because he passed out on the way home.

While our friends were here, we also tried a new ice cream place called Little Man. It was delicious!

Again, I wish I'd gotten some photos with our friends. I'm not sure why I never did! But we loved having them visit and were sad when they left. I'm hoping for another reunion soon!

And now, to end the first of our summer blog posts, here are photos of my kids looking too cool for school! (Get it? Because it's summer? Eh?)