mid summer update

I finally finished uploading some of our pictures tonight and sent Peter to bed without me so I could post here. As mentioned last week, we're having a fun summer with lots of firsts for our kids. The day school ended we kicked things off with a strawberry picking excursion. We celebrated birthdays galore in June, so we had lots of fun family time. Peter's Mom and Bob spoiled us with a day at Dutch Wonderland. We all spent a week's worth of evenings at our church's VBS where I taught the preschool Bible lesson. My parents and sister entertained our kids while Peter and I had our first overnight getaway since becoming parents in honor of our 9th anniversary. The kids saw their first 2 movies on the big screen (Clifford and Veggie Tales) thanks to the Regal's free summer movie series. We've played in creeks. We went on a wonderful 3 day vacation to the National Zoo in DC, Arlan and Marcy's house in VA, and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. We've been improving our swimming skills and confidence thanks to friends and family members with pools and pool memberships. We had our first outing to the beach (not including our quick visit in Liberia) thanks to a speaking invitation from the CCO's Ocean City Beach Project. We've spent lots of time at our local zoo and the library. On July 26th we celebrated Liberian Independence Day with real West African food. (The Liberian restaurant ran out of food, so we had to track down a similar option nearby.) We just spent the evening at Valley Forge having a picnic, riding bikes, and watching deer. Wow! Just reading about everything we've done this summer has made me tired. I'm off to bed, but first I'll link some of our adventures mentioned above to our web albums for those of you who need your fix of our kids or just have nothing better to do.