Summer fun and the garden

The kids and I had a great summer at home.  I am so thankful we have a fenced-in backyard for the kids to run around in.  We stayed home a lot since Lincoln was so little and doing much else was a little overwhelming with 3 kids.  Claire and Tommy played in the sprinkler a few times, but they mostly enjoyed riding their bikes and cars around on the deck and playing in their little playhouse.  They love to go to the gas station and yell food orders to each other out of their playhouse window.  Claire and Tommy made a rock collection and went on "hunts" for animals and monsters.  They also got nice and dirty digging for treasure and actually found and old chewed up dog toy buried in the ground.  Claire and Tommy thought that was awesome!  We have some super nice neighbors next door named Steve and Stefanie so a new game developed called "Steve and Stefanie" where they pretended to be our neighbors.  Claire and Tommy love to pretend and they had a blast playing together this summer.

We did go swimming at Aunt Julia's apartment a few times and we went to the splash pad once.  Claire and Tommy had swimming lessons at the outdoor YMCA at the beginning of the summer and they both did great.  I was worried Tommy would have a hard time leaving me and listening to the swimming instructors, but overall he was happy and listened.  Claire can now swim with just a backpack float on.  The weather in Ohio has been really mild this summer so it never felt really warm enough to swim more than we did.  

I think this was a bus or taxi service!

Here is the beginning of our garden!  We planted some starts in the house (pictured below) and then we planted many more seeds.  We have had tons of green beans and they are delicious!  Our tomato plants did really well.  We only planted cherry tomatoes in our garden, but last year we just threw the Juliet tomatoes (like mini-roma tomatoes) outside of the garden and we had like 11 plants spontaneously grow this year.  It has been great having both varieties of tomatoes.  We had a small, but decent crop of peas.  Tommy has loved eating them right in the garden after I shelled them for him.  The few carrots grew well too.  For the second year the spinach sprouts but doesn't grow and our zucchini plant died from some sort of fungus I think.  Also our green pepper plant just doesn't do well.  We will have to figure out some new things for next year.

Claire and Tommy have been great helpers in the garden.  Claire did a little weeding for some money and they both loved picking the tomatoes and green beans and smashing bean beetles!  It was so fun to see their excitement watching the plants grow and to see the tomatoes change from green to red.  Tommy loves to shout, "MOM, look at that HUGE TOMATO!"