Hello June. I'm glad your here!

I love life (at least most of the time! ) and always enjoy a new month arriving. June promises to be full of good times and good memories! Here are some of the things I am looking forward to this month:

1. My sister Martha and her sweet children coming to stay here in our town (at my parents) for a while since their husband/daddy is busy serving our country. They normally live quite a long ways away and we will love having them close by!

2. Lots of fun messing with plants and playing in the dirt. I still have to finish planting the garden and then it will be time to care for it and harvest from it. I do love that we can watch things grow!

3. Wedding season has begun! I will get to do a lot of playing with flowers in the guise of running my floral business.

4. Going to bible camp! I have great memories of camp growing up and want the same for my children. Later this month my older sister Anna and I will be taking our children (4 each) to Bible Camp in Southern Iowa. We went there when we were kids and then Ken and I helped there while in college and my dad also attended there as a child. Anna and I will be helping out, my Megan and her Gregory will get to just hang out and have fun and the other 6 will be campers. I will miss being gone from Ken for a week but other than that I think it will be a lot of fun.

5. Watching my bees and giving them new honey supers as needed. My beekeeping mentor came over yesterday to check out my hives and said that both of them were doing wonderfully! I thought they were doing well but it was nice to know that someone experienced thought so too. He said that there isn't much work left for the summer, just make sure I always have empty honey supers on for them to fill up. I think I can handle that and am so excited about hopefully harvesting a bunch of honey come fall!

6. Getting to see various missionary and other friends that will be visiting at church this month.

7. The beginning of berry picking. We are really looking forward to that!

8. Biking. Lots and lots of it! Biking to church, to run errands and then bike rides just for fun on the beautiful trails we have around here. We had a very fun ride this past weekend but I think I shall have to write a whole post about that.

9. Enjoying the flowers. Even if they are just dandelions. Even if they are old dandelions. I was so amazed at how many flowers we had in May, June should be even better!

10. No more schoolwork! As of today (for the boys- Mara finished earlier) we are done with the bookwork and we are excited! That doesn't mean we won't be learning or that we won't be spending time in books but we won't have any required lessons for the summer and we are ready for that break!

 I love spending time with my kids and they love the summer. I thought I would share some of the things that they enjoy doing throughout the summer to go along with the "Mom, I'm bored." addition of Works for me Wednesday. My kids know better than to say "Mom, I'm bored" around here (as I can find them things to do quite quickly- and not necessarily things they want to do) so they figure out many ways to stay busy. Here are some of our ideas of fun things for kids to do: 

• Join me in enjoying all the things mentioned above.
• Play baseball.
• Visit the library and read lots of books.
• Try our hand at paper making. (doing our own recycling.)
• Go play and explore in the woods. Look for creatures such as the lizard we found earlier this year.
• Make lots of projects to enter at the county fair.
• Write letters.
• Celebrate odd Holidays such as National Dairy Month, National Candy Month, Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Month, Great outdoors week (2nd full week of June), National Camping Week (4th Week), National Crayon Day (June 7th), National Pink Day (on the 23rd but the boys don't want to celebrate) and Paul Bunyan Day (27th-A big deal here).
• Play in the tree fort and have fun building with old scraps of lumber.
• Play dress-up.
• Learn how to cook and bake better. I am thinking I will turn some of the meals over to the kids to be in charge of.
• Play in our sprinklers. They come on every afternoon and in warm weather the kids love to run through them.
• Play Catch.
• Play Croquet.
• Play Tennis.
• Practice piano and other music. I have now started teaching all of the kids the piano and hopefully they will get in quite a bit of practice this summer.
• Work on learning Spanish. We got Rosetta Stone this past year and we really enjoy it but we have neglected it lately so I hope to get back to it. Then we will try to have some Spanish meals and converse in it as best we can.
• Have picnics- even if it is in our own yard.
• Read books together- out loud.
• Make pudding pops and have fun eating them.
• Play board and card games.

 I don't think we will do any laying around feeling bored. Life is pretty fun!

I hope you have a happy June (and all summer) too!