Things I'm Loving

My post vacation slump almost made me forget how much I love Iowa in the summer! Summer is my favorite season in Iowa! Things I'm loving this week:

• The Freight House Farmer's Market! We went straight to our favorite brats stand to stalk up on pineapple brats, jalapeno cheese brats, and habenero mango brats for the 4th of July weekend. I love the farmer's market atmosphere - music, food sampling, and produce stands everywhere, plus the boys love that everyone brings their dog :) The thing I didn't love - standing in a 45 minute line for these dang balloons:

 

• Spencer's Saturday workout - he got a free old tractor tire so that he could do some of his old USU track workouts and Jack did circles around him on his own tractor the entire time :)

 

• Summer rainstorms! They are so much more enjoyable than winter snowstorms!!!

 
 
 
 

• Jack playing with princesses during David's nap. #boymom ;)

 

• Monday dollar days in the Quad Cities! Every Monday during the summer, the entree fee for many museums and one community pool is just a dollar. This Monday, we went to the Botanical Gardens and surprisingly IT WAS AMAZING! They had coy fish, a splash pad, a man made stream to wade in, sandboxes with showers to rinse off afterwards, craft tables, and a seed planting station. The Botanical Gardens is the best kept secret in the Quad Cities - I was not expecting it to be so fun and we will definitely be back every Monday!

Smelling the flowers.
 

David is making the "sh" sound for "fish" in this picture :)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

David eats everything in this world besides bread but he is finally learning how to eat pb&js which makes my life a whole lot easier on the days that we don't eat at home.
 

Making "seed bombs"
 

• Baseball games. We love everything about baseball games except actually watching the baseball game ;) We got free tickets and went with the Shulcas on Monday night and had so much fun!

 

Picking popcorn out of his teeth with his favorite raccoon :)
 

We went on the ferris wheel and a storm blew in so fast that we thought we were going to be struck by lighting by the time our ride was over! (Spencer didn't ride this time because we switch off every time we go to a game - Jack and David ride free and we don't think it's worth paying another 5 bucks for both of us to go)  I will now proceed to the "ferris wheel selfie" section of this blog post :)
 
 
 

View from the ferris wheel:
 
 

• Accidentally finding my very favorite Trader Joe's cookies that I hid/hoarded and forgot about :)