Hot Summer Fun

 Maren: 

July has been a busy and fantastic month with the best of adventures.  Fourth of July celebrations and fireworks, the fair, and vacation with family!  Our summer is shaping out to be one of the best!  

Given the warm weather daddy wants to be on the river every chance he can get!  We spend many days floating and our new favorite section is from Gold Hill sports park to Valley of the Rogue.  On that section we go underneath the big bridge right near Del Rio Vineyard where they have a rope swing.  This year I gained the courage to go off of the swing for the very first time and I haven't looked back!  I get up there with all of the teenagers and swing like a pro!  

July in the Rogue Valley is fair month.  Mommy hates it (too hot, too many people, super expensive, etc) and daddy loves it (cuz he's crazy)!  This year my best friend, Amelia, invited me to go with her family.  Daddy took Maddox the same day, so we got to see each other, and Mommy got to stay home.  Everyone was happy!  After we got home from the fair, Miss Lori (Amelia's mom) let us have a late-night swim to wash all of the fair germs off! 

As Maddox talks about below, we went to Sun River while Auntie C's was here with the boys.  It was a great adventure and I can't wait to go back.  One of the funniest things that happened while we were there was... we had babies!  We had an incubator full of chicken eggs that were just about to hatch.  Daddy didn't know what to do with them, so he brought them with us!  We ended up hatching 11 little babies over the span of a few days!  One of the other things we got to do while we were in SR was go to the Sharc, an indoor/outdoor water park with slides, a lazy river, and lots of pools to play in.  We had free passes to go but were so busy doing other fun stuff that we only made it one day.  

Maddox: 

As sissy mentioned, this was a really great month.  We have spent tons of time on the river around home and we got to celebrate the Fourth of July with Nonna and Nonno again.  Unfortunately, daddy was on shift that day, but Nonna's neighbors invited us to watch/participate in their huge fireworks display.  Mommy took us to the local tent, and we got to purchase a bunch of our own to contribute. 

Auntie C, Hayden, and Jimi came to visit this month and mommy planned a trip to Sun River for us.  Since they have been to our house so many times she thought it would be fun for us to experience something different.  We got a huge cabin and Nonna and Nonno came too.  To top it off, we got to pick up Uncle Tom in Redmond the day that we went so he was with us the whole time!  On our way there mommy pointed out a fence that was painted red, white, and blue.  When she asked me if I saw it, I said "No.  But I did see a bunch of hot dogs growing on the side of the road!"  Turns out I was referring to the cat tails!  

We really enjoyed the trip to Sun River.  The cabin had a bunch of bikes and we took ours from home, so we spent lots of time riding the trails around the resort area.  One of the days we were there, we went to a place called East Lake and Paulina Falls.  The runoff stream that leads to the falls is really beautiful and has lots of little pools for wading and swimming and also has a bunch of really slippery rock formations that double as natural water slides (kind of).  We spent a beautiful day there playing in the water.  We also got to float the Sun River one day which was a lot of fun.  It was a completely lazy float and I got to paddle my own vessel the whole way!  I was very proud of myself and mommy and daddy were completely blown away by it.   

Towards the end of the month we got a special invite from one of daddy's cousins to travel up the Columbia River on his really big boat.  It was something totally different for all of us and a really fun opportunity.  We drove up to Portland, met them at a public dock and jumped on.  We traveled up the Columbia for quite a ways and got to see some really neet things.  One of the coolest things we did was go through the "Locks".  It is a system that allows boats to pass by the big damn in the river.  I also really liked seeing the people wind surfing and kite boarding.