BUSIEST WEEK OF THE SUMMER

We were hopping this week, and although it wasn't well planned, we were prepared. (What happened was that I signed Joel and Carolyn up for "Art Camp" for this week, thinking we had nothing else....then Matthew indicated he would rather do science camp than band camp and this was the only week it was offered.) This is really the only "camp" the kids have all summer (not including Boy Scout Camp).

Art Camp was run by the kid's art teacher from school. That means we just had to walk up to school to attend. This was especially good, since one of our baby-sitters had to walk the kids to camp 3 days of the week so I could get Matthew to camp.

Carolyn and her art (I won't show the handful of clothes that were enhanced by paint...better outfit planning for art camp next year.)

Joel's art (surprisingly, I didn't notice any paint on his clothes...interesting since he basically wears Matthew's hand-me-downs in the summer, so really nothing could be ruined (I mean enhanced) anyway))

Matthew attended "Toying with Technology" camp at Iowa State. (It sounds far away, but it is really as close as going to University of Evansville or USI (University of Southern Indiana) from Newburgh, because we live North East of Des Moines and Ames is just up the road.) Almost all of the week was spent programming Lego robots, called NXT....whatever - he really loved it and enjoyed that it was "hands-on". It wasn't what I was expecting, but a success anyway.

I could do a post on the next item alone, but since we are leaving on vacation tomorrow, I will make it brief. My cousin is a professor at Iowa State and happens to have an office in the same building as Matthew's class. On Wednesday he gave us a tour of the VERY cool Aerospace labs in the building. The kids got to climb in an airplane, air tunnel and tornado simulator.

We were able to take advantage of the trips to Iowa State by meeting with my niece, Liz, who goes to school there. After making the trip 8 times this week, I really wondered why we hadn't visited her earlier. It is just a zip up I35 and you are there. The little boy you don't recognize is one of the boys who Liz baby-sits this summer. The other little boy was resting in his stroller with me. What a lucky little boys they are to have Liz as their nanny.

Carolyn also had her last day of "cheer". This was more like her spring/summer sport than "camp", since she didn't do soccer or baseball, like the boys.


Whew - my house really demonstrated what a busy week we had, because it was a mess by Friday. Luckily we decided to work at cleaning it before we leave on vacation, so we put the kids to work at picking up their stuff and it has recovered. Hopefully this will be fun memory of the summer for the kids.