Summer-ing

Why isn't summering a word?

You might ask us, "What have you been doing for the last month and a bit?"
And we would answer, "Oh, we've just been summering."

Because that's exactly what we've been doing. We've been doing all the things that make up a perfectly wonderful lovely summer. Here are some pictures of phase 1 of our summering.

We went to Nebraska for 3 weeks. We stayed with Grandma and Grandpa and crammed in as much fun as I could handle while Greg flew to the Netherlands for a business trip. One of the first stops was Pioneers Park. A beautiful park full of rolling hills, green (Nebraska is GREEN, not muddled brownish green that I see everywhere here) open meadows, a couple of small lakes, a playground, nature center, etc. I forgot how much fun Pioneers Park can be. We fed the geese and my kids loved it. It was hard to get them to move on to other things even when we ran out of bread. This little family of "gooses" (Maddie called them gooses)adopted us. Jacob said it was because we had four kids, a mom and a dad, and they had the same. It was cute. Then we went and had a picnic lunch and moved on to the nature center. Which is lovely and would take a couple of trips to explore thouroughly. We had to leave because Annabelle was exhausted, otherwise I think my kids would have stayed there forever. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Pioneers Park. We actually went back the Saturday before we left with Greg. We also got a new camera, can you tell?

Annabelle in the nature center bird watching area. She went nuts looking at all the birds through the big windows.

Our family of geese.

J Jacob is thrilled to be out in the "wild."

Walking in the nature center

Maddie, just being Maddie

Annabelle really didn't want her picture taken, but it was a lovely little spot with the sun breaking through the trees. Phooey.

Lorelei was in heaven.

Annabelle kept pointing to all the butterflies.

One of the lakes in the nature center.