June

In June I hosted a baby shower for my friend Beth, who was preparing to adopt a little boy from Poland. Peter has since joined their family as their 4th child. He is five now and is steadily adapting to life in his new family. I had fun making lots of little treats and using my mom's flowers from her garden to decorate.

A bunch of family met up at Shawn's for McLaren's graduation from high school. Yay, McLaren!

One morning we found a cute little tree frog snoozing in the curl of the front porch chair. 

Maddie and Caleb braved the heat with FaFa and picked a pail of wild blackberries from around the pond. 

They were rewarded that afternoon with blackberry chocolate chip ice cream!

Nonna & FaFa shared some of their watermelons with us.

Duke wanted to lose a few pounds so he decided that really hot weather was the best time to RUN around the house all day in his lion costume. 

I have returned to painting...well, here and there, that is. I messed around with some little herb sketches.

The kids got a huge kick out of the monster egg I brought home from our friends down the street where we buy our eggs. It was truly the most enormous chicken egg I have ever seen. 

Caleb was the lucky one who got to eat it - I fried it for him and it took up nearly the whole skillet!

I picked these carrots from the garden. 

Pretty garden flowers!

Summer color!

I think the kids' favorite meal of the month was hamburgers with oven-fried potato chips.

The littles painted

And I walked in on this sweet moment...a first. ALL 4 KIDS playing together. Now that's a moment to remember! The bigs were playing monopoly and the littles joined in on their teams.