2nd Generation Friends

One of the fun parts of moving--getting to see my kids make friends with the children of MY childhood friends. S and I met in 4th grade and quickly became best friends, and now, getting to live in the same city again, after 22 years apart, it is so fun seeing the next generation continue the tradition of imaginative games, adventures, stories, and generally loud, crazy times together.

We've loved having another family to celebrate birthdays with, have dinners, and explore Livermore.

(Even the dog gets in on the fun sometimes.)

We knew this was one of the pros to moving back close to where I grew up.

These get togethers feel pretty magical to me. Who would have thought we'd all still be in touch and have all these kids who seem to get along so well.?

And of course, I love getting to hang out with my friends, too. Hard to believe that it's been almost 30 years since 7th grade and our Lunch Bunch.

Start to Summer

Blueberry Picking--Some new homeschool friends invited us to go to a farm about 40 minutes away to pick berries at the beginning of the month.

This was a new experience for us, and we are huge fans because fresh picked blueberries are AMAZING. They're kind of fun to pick, too. We ended up with about 4 pounds and ate 1/2 of them before we got home.

Farmer's Market--Thursday night is Farmer's Market night in Livermore--food booths, live music, and fresh produce. We've been getting amazing berries for several weeks (and thanks to CA weather, the strawberries will be in season until November!) We've gotten dinner down there a couple times, too, which is fun.

The Alameda County Fair--June means fair time. I think it's kind of a requirement that if you homeschool, you do fair stuff ;) Not really, but a lot of the homeschoolers we know here do 4-H, and they do enter things in the fair, so we decided to send a few things in, too.

Peanut made Chocolate Date Ball Cookies.

Bean made Chocolate Chip cookies.

And all 3 kids entered the egg carton creation competition.

Bean's Alien Planet

Peanut's frog and turtle pond.

And Bug's gnome garden. (We will not talk about how Bug didn't get an award for this, even though a couple of the much simpler creations did. He was pretty disappointed, but I think he still had a lot of fun making this.)

Bug also made cookies for a special recipe completion--we still have to go back to find out how he did.

Even Daddy-o got in on the action and made his toffee pecan bars. They came in 3rd behind some absolutely amazing looking macaroons and chocolate crinkle cookie. I didn't get a picture of my bread or photo, neither one of which won, but it's fun having my picture on display this month.

The day we dropped off our baked goods, we also got to see a litter of hours old piglets. All part of the fair fun.

Lego Challenges--I found a fun calendar with a Lego idea for each day of June. The kids only did a few of the days, but they had fun coming up with things to fulfill the challenges.

Finishing up school--We've been trying to tie up the end of the school year. The kids made gold miner journals that they've been working on this month, as well as the last chapters of their math books. Once those are done, we're calling it a year. We'll still be reading, dabbling in science, and doing some fun field trips this summer, but nothing really formal. It's a little hard to distinguish the difference between school and life, but I think just saying this is summer vacation makes it feel different. We're still learning, without the pressure to accomplish a certain amount of work each day. We all need a break.

And that's all the random stuff from June that doesn't get it's own post.

Fun at the Fair

Since the kids have seen Charlotte's Web twice this summer, they have really wanted to go to a fair of their own, so we decided to hit up one of the local county fairs on Saturday.

We took them on their first Ferris Wheel (and mine, too! I've always been terrified of any ride that can be put up and down on a weekly basis all summer, but Daddy-o and I started talking about it and maybe those rides are actually safer since they are maintained on a weekly schedule, so I've been going about it all wrong.)

They loved it!

We ate cotton candy,

and loved that, too.

We saw swimming pigs,

stinky animals,

a donkey!,

and an incredibly ugly (unmarked, and therefore unidentifiable by us,) bird.

Bugaboo seems to finally be over his animal fears.

They got to practice their mean tractor driving skills. . .

"Mean" being the operative word. . .

I don't have any idea where he learned to drive like that. Nope, no road rage here, or even mild annoyance at the multitude of really stupid drivers, who seriously don't know how to take turns at a 4-way stop, or pay attention to the "Keep Moving" signs when there isn't a stop sign, or stay out of the way of people who would really like to make a right turn at the red light where there is almost zero traffic every single day. Nope, the mad rush of getting Daddy-o to the bus stop on time is always a very calm, happy experience.

And then there was the firefighter show. Bugaboo heard them announce that they would be calling for volunteers and he got so serious, "I want to do that."

So when they guy told them to raise their hands, Bugaboo got his hand up high, and then he asked for two hands, so Buggy got both his hands up and stood on Daddy-o's lap, and then he told them to wave their hands back and forth, so Buggy waved as hard as he could.

And then the firefighter picked a bunch of 7 or 8 year olds.

The look on my little man's face almost broke my heart. He was so sure he was doing everything right and was going to be helping the man fight some fires that night. But he got over it and enjoyed the show. And there isn't any way he could have done what they had the kids do, so we told him maybe in a couple years.

At least he got a fire hat.