What's on our Stereo and How our Summer Ended

Another favorite summer pasttime is over;

our listening to audiobooks on our travels.

Mourn.

*Last summer list over here.

This year we started off with a favorite, "Dragonsdale" by Salamanda Drake, and were so excited to find that there was now a second book in the series.

Squeal!

We weren't able to get "Riding the Storm" in audio form so the girsl and I had a big tug-a-war over that poor book all during our three day beach vacation.  It was a fun one.  Those girls and their dragons sure got into an aweful lot of scrapes.

We tried a few classics that I had never read(for shame).  "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Wizard of Oz" were great hits. It cracked me up to no end to hear Gracie tell someone about the "wing-ed monkeys"  We did not make it through "Peter Pan".  We gave up about 15 minutes in when it never got past describing Mr. Darling. I was losing patience and so was Gracie.  She really wanted to hear about Tinker Bell.

Especially for the boys we heard "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" but I think Gracie enjoyed it the most.  When loading into the car she would always try to get Cayden excited about hearing it, "Cayden, lets ask mom to turn on the motorcycles!"

And this book, Judy Blume's "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing", had to be my kids' absolute favorite this summer.  We are forever quoting it and acting out its scenes.  My kids could all relate to this story really well because the main character has a terribly terrible little toddler brother(whom is called Fudgie), just like my kids do.

"Eat it or Wear it"as Fudge always says.

 And lastly we ended with an interesting book, "Northward to the Moon." I grabed it because it was written by the same author as "Everything on a Waffle" that we listened to last summer.  I guess this author's style is a bit mature for me and my girls.  We very much enjoy the happily ever after stories and hers do not quite end that way.  It was a good experience for us, but I did have to do some explaining about why the main character didn't know who her father was.  And Horvath ended the book on a cliff hanger!  We didn't know what to do.  After researching we discovered that there is a pre-qual to this book, "My One Hundred Adventures" which would have helped us figure out this second book a bit better, but there is not a sequal.  We ordered the 1st book from the library and have yet to pick it up.

I guess here is as good a place as any to post the final outcome of our summer's Goal List too.

Our list isn't pretty, just a list written out at family home evening one early summer week and taped on the wall, ice cream smears and all.  I kept thinking about "cutsie-ing" it up, but it never happened.

We accomplished about 62% of our Places to Go.  We did have to do some editing when we switched Six Flags for a closer destination theme park, and thanks to a work trip we were able to squeeze in our beach vacation.  Next year it's just got to go on the calendar early so "other things" dont take over our vacation days.  We still have a few places we missed and gratefully Fall is a super time to visit those places- and we just need to take the Clark's with us.  We missed them this summer.

I feel like we missed the mark a bit on our Things to Accomplish.  One trouble is we wrote them a bit lofty and had to switch out the word "master" for simply "practiced"on many of our goals.  And after Gracie and I butted heads for a few afternoons trying to do "school" I kinda gave up and just made her watch all those Leapster Learning videos on Netflix during the boys naptime.  

We missed out on our sewing project, which was a bummer.  We really enjoyed it last year.

  

But I can't believe we didn't fit in our Harry Potter movies this year!

Emma is halfway through reading the series and Ellie read them all again this summer.  My mom even gave us digital copies of all of them and we forgot about them.

Too much other fun, I guess.

We did, however, get Gracie to use her pedal bike. yea!

In any case, I am pleased with our summer.  My girls are growing up and are becoming excellent helpers, they like doing things on thier own, and are gaining new skills everyday.  This was a summer that I didn't want to end and I was not ready to send them off to a new year of school- although it turns out that a nice Kindergarten teacher is all Gracie needed to jump into letter, sounds, and number learning;)