Father's Day weekend

To celebrate Father's Day weekend, we headed to a Smokies game on Saturday and went fishing on Sunday.  The kids have really enjoyed baseball games this summer, but this one was even more exciting because they got to do the base change buddies event!  Hopefully their dad enjoyed his weekend as much as the kids :)

Orange Beach

We headed back to our favorite beach for vacation last week.  We had a great time, and there was definitely not a dull moment.  We hadn't been there 5 minutes when Evie dropped a 3 foot shovel off the 9th floor balcony.  Thankfully it was plastic and landed in the bushes below.  We had big waves the whole time and red flag conditions at the end of the week.  Andrew kept us entertained with his observations.  My favorite was when he pointed out the person on a string, which turned out to be a person parasailing.  We watched two weddings and a beach rescue.  There weren't any lifeguards during our last trip, and it turns out there is a great story about parents turning a tragedy into something positive behind the new beach patrol.  Lots of people were helped by Molly's Patrol on Thursday and Friday. The rain kept us off the beach on Saturday and caused the roads (and our breezeway) to flood.  During the rain the fire alarm sounded in our building, so we had to to evacuate.  I'm sure we looked a mess but we went to lunch instead of standing in the rain.  Andrew lost a tooth on Saturday and failed to look for tooth fairy money on Sunday before we left, so his dollar was left behind.  Yep, never a dull moment.    

 OBA 2012

He loved riding the waves

 She was more timid, but loved it once she got brave enough

Summer Learning: Baseball

I have great respect for all the homeschooling mamas out there.  While I'm not even entertaining the thought of homeschooling for real, I thought it would be fun to pick some topics to learn about this summer to prevent any regression before 1st and 3rd grade.  If you follow me on Pinterest then you probably are already clued in to my plan.  Great resources for education available on there by the way.  Our first topic was baseball.  The kids have been reading books, defining baseball terms, and drawing fields and stadiums.  Of course we also got to take a field trip!  We took our reading logs from the Smokies Summer Reading Program and exchanged them for tickets to the game on Wednesday night.  It was so rewarding to hear the kids pointing out the different player positions, talking about what kind of a hit it was, and understanding what all the numbers on the scoreboard meant.  They were seeing all of their knowledge put into action.      

The books we read are listed below.  They all came from our local library!

Baseball Science

Ultimate Guide to Baseball

The Everything Kids Baseball Book

A Whole New Ball Game: All American Girls 

Baseball from A to Z