Summer recap

This has been a really wonderful summer. We've had lots and lots of good, hot days, and not a terrible amount of rain! Here are a few highlights:

*Getting our driveway redone. The boys had such a great time watching from the deck! They still talk about (and sing about!) the man who did our earth moving. He is a hero around here, ha!
*The library's summer reading program. The boys and I signed our family up and headed off to literary wonderland... we read lots and lots of books from specific categories and marked off each reading session in 15-minute increments to earn ourselves one free book each and tickets to a B-Mets game. It really was a lot of fun! And it got us reading the A to Z Mysteries series (because one of our requirements was to read a mystery), which Ben now loves.
*Playdates, picnics, and birthday parties. Is there anything better than picnicking at the playground? We did a few of these, and it was so much fun to reconnect with some of Ben's little buddies from preschool, as well as their moms and siblings.
*B-Mets! Ben and Matt got to go to three games this year! Josh took them to one and I got to take them to two. The games I was at had a fun intermission where the kids are allowed to run across the grass of the outfield, from the third baseline to the first baseline. Very cute! The players are on the field at the time, too, so they get a chance to see them up close.
*Soaking up the sun (and the water!) at the spray park. We made it here two or three times this year - which is an improvement over last year! :) We are very lucky to have a small (free!) spray park fairly close to our house. We went by ourselves a few times and met a friend once.
*The zoo and Discovery Center! We met a family at the Discovery Center and played for a bit, had lunch, and then moseyed on over to the zoo. It was here that we picked up our first carousel card.
*Riding the "circuit" of the carousels. There are 6 carousels in the southern tier, and all of them are free. The farthest one is probably... 20, 25 minutes from here? We made an afternoon of it and hit each carousel along the route, collecting each carousel's card along the way. We turned in our cards and they gave us a button that says, "I rode the carousel circuit." Cute! The boys loved it. I kind of did, too.
*We didn't make it to Enchanted Forest this year, I think because we waited until too late in the season. The day we had picked to go wasn't really super hot, at least in Old Forge... but we did notice that it was quite a bit warmer even here at home. So, Josh looked around and found a waterpark in PA that was a reasonable distance away, and we spent the day! I didn't take a single picture (the whole thing was a waterpark, no dry rides!) so you'll just have to trust me when I say we had a good time.