catching up

I seem to use the title "catching up" often. It feels like I can never quite catch up but today is a rainy Saturday so I thought I would spend some time on the blog.....
Since I last posted Jack started 4yr old Kindergarten. He is going 2 full days a week and is LOVING it. It is amazing to me what he already knew and what he is learning. Luckily we had found a great daycare that does a preschool curriculum and he knew alot of the basics when it came to the alphabet and counting. What I have notice more of his learning taking off is in his writing....he is SO into writing notes and letters. He also has learned some great stories from the Bible and has memorized two Bible versus. We are lucky as he asks every morning if it is a school day and gets bummed if it's not.
The weekend after Labor day we packed up and headed north to Itasca state park for our first "real" camping trip. Jack has been asking all summer to go so we finally made the reservations back in July for the soonest opening at Itasca. We had BEAUTIFUL weather and absolutely no bugs (my kind of camping). We did lots of biking, played at the playground and spent some time at the headwaters. All in all I would say it was a success. Of course the day we left it rained the entire way home so all of our stuff was wet....at least it was dry while we were camping. Hopefully we can plan a few more trips next year :)

So Proud

Camping breakfast

Jack was so excited about climbing the fire tower. He ran the whole time...almost a mile!

Lydia on the other hand was content with checking out what there was to investigate on the way.

Pre-fire tower climbing

this is about a quarter of the way up...jack and daddy turned around at this point

Little Dare devil was determined to climb to the top....

Tiring bike ride back. Daddy was the tired one after pulling them 15 miles up a million hills

Jack's favorite part of our camping trip-the Mississippi Headwaters

Saying goodbye to our site :)

We had been wanting to take a trip to Camp Ripley this summer. My parents told us about family day so we decided to head up that weekend. We brought some good friends--The Terhell Family. All of the kids had a blast, even the big kids (jayd and ryan:)
Ok, somehow the pictures for this are at the top of the blog,...ugh....