Summer Shakedown

 At the beginning of the summer, we sat down and made a summer bucket list. I'm happy to say we checked off nearly every item on the list! And we'll even manage to work through the remaining few in the next two weeks or so, before the season officially ends. Here are some highlights from our activities.

We saw the movie Brave. Can I say how happy I am to finally have a Disney princess who is worth Bria's admiration? Nice work, Disney. (finally!)

We hit up the Old Town farmer's market. Sure it started raining as soon as we walked up, but we snagged our farm fresh produce before ducking under this covered stage to eat muffins and have a dance party.

 Bria and I have had some excellent lunch dates.

We've worked diligently on reading lessons. The first few were tricky, but we found our groove, and now we're cruising through. We're using a copy of the same lessons my mom used with me and all my siblings-- it's fun to find some of my mom's notes on our progress through the pages.

We watched a lot of the Olypmics. And I mean a lot. There were days we had the tv, our laptop, and our desktop all streaming different events. Bria's favorites were swimming, synchronized swimming and gymnastics. She ran around the house yelling "I'm Gabby Douglas!" and staging floor routines on our bed. 

We went to Ocean City to celebrate a friend's birthday.

We rode the metro in for some DC fun.

 Including visiting the Navy Memorial (ok, we were really just there to go to Paul with some friends.)

Bria discovered Arthur. That show has been on air forever-- it's in it's 16th season!

Bria and I sneaked into Nationals Stadium after Truckeroo. Bria wanted to see it, and I saw an open gate. Sam waited nervously outside, while we snapped some pictures pretty close to the field. I saw a security guard spot us as we slipped back out through the gate, and he came up behind us and locked the gate up tight.

Bria expressed herself in the rain.

We took two trips to Great Waves.

And we ventured out to National Harbor to cheer on the rowers at the dragon boat regatta. 

We also went to Utah for 10 days (which deserves its own post), and we're heading down to Williamsburg with my parents on Saturday, so we have plenty more fun to pack in!