End of Summer Fun

Summer was way too short here. In fact, this summer was really weird and colder than usual. I thought we would be living at the beach, but we actually only went a handful of times. Everyone told me that I would love it here once summer hit, but it never fully came. Luckily, we were able to find other fun activities to do. We had fun exploring all the death trap playgrounds in our area. They are definitely not regulating things in these small towns and we have plenty of huge metal slides that will either burn your skin or flat out kill you. Of course my kids love them, but I made the mistake of going down once with Conrad and I realized how dangerous it was and he got a taste of how fun it was, so we had to leave. 

We also really enjoyed the library's summer reading program. They had some sweet prizes and at the end you got a free ride on the carousal and a free ice cream cone from Kilwan's. Those cones, while delicious, are expensive at $4.50 a pop, which to me is a bit absurd. They also had a drawing at the end and Netta actually won 2 tickets to the Grand Rapids Zoo. We are learning that a perk to living in a small town is that you can actually win when there are contests. I had to include both these pictures of the kids enjoying their ice cream just to show how comically hard it is to get a picture of all of them smiling and looking at the camera. 

We also won some free photography through the guy who took EZ's baseball pictures. I was really excited because we loved his picture, but then we found out his prices for family pictures and we learned that the $200 we won actually didn't get us much. The real kicker was that you have to buy all the prints through him, which are really expensive and if you want a digital copy it will cost you a minimum of $500! All I wanted was one family picture for Christmas cards and sadly it was a struggle to get even one we liked. The kids were being kind of cranky, but then he also did not know how to work well with little kids. We miss our photographer Jessica from Texas :( Anyway, on the bright side he did have a little pond and some ducks in his backyard that we got to play with.

When we found out there was a county fair, we had to hit that up. Unfortunately, it was cold and rainy the whole time. The kids didn't mind, but I never would have thought I would be wearing boots and a jacket in August. Of course the crazy unhealthy food was a huge hit as was the free circus. It was definitely free for the reason, but the kids don't know any different ;) The also had a ton of animals to see and a bunch of cows that were about to give birth and if you were lucky you would get to see it. Our entertainment options are definitely way different than in Austin. HaHa