June

6 years

2 1/2 years

Almost 11

Almost 8 

Last day of school

Last time walking/carpooling with the Petersons

Tunnel Park sand dune

Stuffing themselves with strawberries

Two of them are happy

At Hoffmaster State Park

Rainy morning breakfast in the camper

Running the dunes at Hoffmaster

Heritage Camp friends

Nice pic with the grandparents

Ballet/tumbling class

Isaac and Levi Gabrielse

The backpacking group

South Manitou Island

Dad built this bunkbed!

So I'm writing about June when school ended and the new school year started last week.  Crazy.  The kids were so excited to start summer vacation. And I had big ideas for the summer.  We will be scheduled and they will do math pages, reading, practice piano and Korean!  Yeah, that lasted about 2 weeks.  They still read, Isaac tried to avoid it as much as possible. We had families over for dinner that we'd meant to invite for a while.  We needed to get it done before Lexi came home!  It is always fun to share a meal and get to know other people better.  Caleb did a basketball camp at Holland Christian for a week.  He was shooting hoops all the time before camp and not so much after camp, not sure what that means...

We went camping at Hoffmaster State Park.  The weather wasn't super great, but it mostly rained at night so we could still be outdoors during the day.  We had one rainy breakfast which made us thankful for the ability to eat inside our camper.  Funny story, we ran out of propane for our outdoor stove.  We needed to make hot water in the morning and decided the best we could do was run hot water thru the coffee pot.  The next morning we realized, oh yeah there is a stove top in our camper that we can use!  This was the last camping trip that our whole family could sleep inside the camper.  From now on the older boys will have to sleep in a tent.  They think it will be great fun.

Julia attended Heritage Camp again.  It is a week long day camp.  Originally we didn't want to pay the extra money for the older boys to go, but it would have been worth it.  We spent so much time in the car driving back/forth to GR that week.  It would have made more sense for them to stay at camp.  The older boys did do Heritage Camp with Julia a couple summers ago and they learned alot about Korea.  Julia loves Heritage Camp- the food, spending time with other Korean adopted kids and learning about Korea.  One of the teen helpers was supposedly named Julia Cho too!  I didn't get a chance to meet her and verify, but Julia was adamant this was true.  Julia also got bunkbeds for her room, made by Nate!  They look great and Julia is happy to be on the top bunk.  Lexi will sleep in a crib in Julia's room for now.  Julia also did a tumbling/ballet class for the first time.  She seemed to enjoy it, more so than soccer last year.

Nate, Caleb and Isaac did the annual backpacking trip.  There was a large group of Dads/kids that went this year to South Manitou island.  Moms are not allowed on this trip.  Yeah, that's really too bad.  The boys love backpacking rules or lack of rules and spending time with their friends.  They always come back with lots of stories and thankfully no poison ivy this year!

We spent the month of June on pins and needles waiting to hear if we would travel to China in July- and we got the travel call!  We were so excited to finally bring Lexi home and we were crazy busy getting ready for the trip.