Summer is officially over (and has been for a little while now). It’s sad to feel autumn in the air and to realize that the summer weather will be gone very soon. As exciting as it is to think about all that comes with colder weather (Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, etc.), you can’t help but wish summer would stay for awhile longer.

This has been our first summer at our new house and it’s definitely been a fun one. We went swimming a numerous amount of times in the beginning of the summer at the neighborhood pool. It’s a nice pool not too far away from our house that’s great for little kids because of their water squirters and large shallow area. Isabelle is a lot like Jadon when he was younger because she loves the water too. She loved playing with all the squirters and splashing everyone like crazy.

This year, we finally put Jadon in swimming lessons. We’ve been wanting him to do it for awhile now, but finally were able to for the last session of the season. It was his first set of lessons of any kind and didn’t go too well at first. He refused to get in the water for the first 2 lessons, but absolutely loved it when he finally got in. He didn’t learn anything (seriously such a waste of money) but he enjoyed it and it was his first taste of group lessons. We’ll probably put him in some private lessons at some point so he will actually pay attention and the teacher can then focus on him alone. We want both the kiddies to learn to swim when they’re younger for safety purposes so we’ll definitely be better about starting Isabelle earlier too. Side note: Andrew thinks it’s hilarious that I’m a “good” swimmer compared to the rest of my family (with the exception of a couple New Yorkers…) and that’s not even saying much, because he likes to tell everyone I almost drowned him on our honeymoon. For the record, I’m pretty sure I can swim to save my life.

Other fun activities we’ve done around our neighborhood include taking lots of walks. We walk to our garden, which has flourished despite our lack of gardening knowledge, the park, and around the lake. We’ve been able to get Isabelle to sit in the new Bob Revolution Duallie stroller we bought on sale from REI with Jadon instead of wearing her in the Ergo, so we even jogged/walked the neighborhood 5k fun run. It was my first 5k and Andrew’s second running thing this year. The first being the Marathon Relay where he ran 1/5 of a marathon.

We’ve also gone camping a couple times this year. The first time we went to Palisades with a bunch of friends and camped in a cabin. There was definitely no roughing it there, but it was fun and Isabelle slept through the night very well. The second time we went to Yuba Lake and that was a crazy experience with the sand storms that went on when we first got there. You can read it about that trip on the Sabin’s blog.

For pictures of everything that we’ve done this summer, check out Facebook. That’s where all the pictures are posted. I’ll try to be better at blogging and keeping updated. Thanks for reading.