June

One of our neighbors was throwing out this camping rocking chair and James fell in love with it. Now it is on our front porch!

James's cub scout pack finally had their pinewood derby that was rescheduled from March. It was a combined pinewood derby/end of the year award ceremony. At first I wasn't sure where James's pinewood derby car was since he hadn't touched it since March, but we finally found it. James and Anthony didn't really spend a lot of time on his car this year, so we weren't expecting to do very well. They did three rounds where each car raced one time on each of the 6 lanes. James did pretty well on each round! Here he is telling me which place his car came in after each race:

Break for cupcakes!

After the three heats, they had a finals race with the top 4 and James was one of the top 4. After the final races the computer calculated the average speed of each car and declared James the winner! He won 1st place!

Owen from his den got 2nd place, so their den really represented! James also got his bear badge so it was a big day.

Rett's kindergarten teacher dropped off a pail of goodies for him that included beach toys and a Llama Llama book. He was so happy to get something since he saw James get goodies from his teacher a few weeks earlier!

Playing at the jumpy place:

I decided to do an entire house cleanout this summer, including our closet. I found a pair of Anthony's jeans from high school and they were ridiculously large!! I made him try them on and model them before I gave them to goodwill.

For Father's Day Anthony got a heavy duty meat grinder. Our friend let us watch him grind up sausage and ground pork, and after that we were dying to do some of our own! We bought the exact grinder he had so that we could try to make the same awesome tasting sausage he made. We used wild pork from a pig that Anthony shot a while back, and we also ground up some deer we had in the freezer. It was an all day project, but so fun!

Before we put the sausage into links, we cooked up a little bit of it to make sure the seasonings were right. It was soooooo good we wanted to keep eating it!

We left some unseasoned to use as plain ground pork:

James started going to karate with Rett's class once they opened back up after the shutdown. He very quickly earned his first yellow stripe!

All the kids who advanced that day with James and their instructors:

A few teachers planned a beach day and the boys had a blast playing with the "teacher kids". I told Rett he had to give me a normal picture before he could do a weird one:

It was a beautiful day for it!

I accidentally forgot to put sunscreen on James while we were at the beach and he played in the sun for 4 hours at the beach! Thankfully he has Anthony's skin and for the most part just gets darker. Look at the difference from where his swim shirt was!

We decided to play at a different park than usual that has a cute ice cream shop across the street. It was sooooo hot outside that we were ready for ice cream pretty quickly.

Voldetort got out again!! He had his tracker on with a fresh battery, but it still malfunctioned. This time he was gone for three weeks until someone mentioned on Facebook something about a big tortoise hanging out behind their fence. It turns out he was 1 mile south of us, following the train tracks. Once we discovered where he was, we jumped in the car in the middle of the night and went to grab him before he could get away again. Stinker!

Gatorland in Orlando had a florida resident special, so we decided to try it out. It was so fun to see so many gators!! It was crazy hot and the boys hated having to wear a mask, but overall we had a good time.

They had a Galapagos and an Aldabra tortoise! Those two are the only two tortoise species that are bigger than ours. Can you guess what Anthony is dying to get now?

Panthers:

We got to ride the train around the park:

Massive gator!

Baby birds!

They had a petting zoo area with goats, cows, and an emu:

Watching the gator show:

Albino gators:

Rattlesnake:

The flamingos were so cool to see up close!

James and Rett had a cousins day at the zoo with Mimi and Papa and their cousins. Nevada reintroduced James to snapchat. He couldn't get enough of the funny filters!

Anthony's parents and the cousins stayed at our house to watch our animals while we drove 3 hours to the west coast of Florida for some shark tooth hunting! It was such a fun mini vacation! We brought a lot of shark teeth hunting supplies and spent almost the entire 3 days we were there at the beach looking for shark teeth.

Our finds from our first day:

After spending a few days at the beach closest to our hotel, we tried out a different spot a friend told us about. There were soooo many more shark teeth! You could just sit in the sand and sift with your fingers and find them. We had so much fun there.

Look at these tiny teeth we were finding!

A group of manatees swam right up to shore in front of us and stuck around the entire day! It was so cool to see the manatees up close.

The sunset was amazing! I had no idea that it went down so quickly, literally 5 minutes after I took this picture, the sun was gone!

We met some friends at the splash pad. Kona Ice was there, so of course we had to get some. It was nice to feel like it was a normal summer day.

I have no idea why Rett is jumping in this picture!

We've started having weekly playdates with a teacher friend of mine whose son was in Rett's kindergarten class. It is always fun to see them run around like crazy once they get to be around kids!