Bon Voyage!

I'm off for the summer and I have a lot to do before then, so I'll keep this very short and sweet! 

Here are a few of my favorite pins from my "Beachy Keen" Pinterest board that reflect my state of mind pretty well right now.

   

 I'll be back to blogging again in September. 

I hope you have a wonderful summer!

The Summer of '69, I mean '15

I didn't make my goal of doing blog posts about the summer of 2015 before I left for the summer, but I'm glad I got all of summer of 2016 done. At this point, I guess the things we did two summers ago just aren't going to be very well-documented on my blog, and I have to convince my perfectionist self that that's okay. Chill, girl! Just because you don't write about it on your blog doesn't mean it didn't happen! I did do the posts I wanted to do about our trip to Williamsburg, Virginia in the summer of 2015, and that gives me satisfaction. 

But in order to further satisfy myself, I'm just going to post a few of my favorite pictures from the summer of 2015 and be done with it! (Wow, I sure am saying "summer of 2015" a lot.) 

 So without further ado, here are some of my favorite pictures of...you know what!

Purgatory Chasm in Sutton, MA

At Castle in the Clouds in New Hampshire

This rocks!

  

 At the Cape (stating the obvious).

Far out on the sea floor at low tide.

I love this picture of my boys.

Jennifer, me, Hayley, and Nate (my youngest brother)

As you can see, the tide was coming back in.

Dark pink sand out on the sea floor. I still haven't figured this one out!

Looking for hermit crabs. 💛

At the Inflatable Park

All four of me and my sister's boys.

My birthday dinner--lazy man's lobster at Yarmouth House. My favorite!

  

Sam examines a horsehoe crab (it was dead).

Sam examines jellyfish (they were alive, obviously).

 Sam examines the interior of a giant bubble!

My whole family (minus my dad) celebrating my mom's 60th birthday. 

  

Alright, that was more than a few of my favorites! But I can now consider the summer of 2015 to be done as far as this blog is concerned. That's a beautiful thing, and it was a beautiful summer!

The Last of My Summer 2016 Photos!

This is my final blog post about summer 2016!

Caution: total and complete randomness ahead!

A cemetery near my hometown where some of my relatives and ancestors are buried. 

Family history, we are doing it!

An opportunity...

...taken.

💙 Our flip-flops at the beach. 💙

 Did I post pictures already of our new porch chairs? I don't remember. Well, here they are! 

I got a new welcome mat for the front door and it just happens to coordinate with the new area rugs inside for the living room and front hallway. (That's why I got it!)

We had the big dead tree in the front yard taken down, along with a few other trees and branches around the front and backyard.

Adios tree. Even though you were dead, I miss you. Now you really are dead. 😞

The yard DESPERATELY needs some landscaping work as well as a new backyard fence.

My hope and goal for the not-too-distant future is to get a new fence, then have hydrangea bushes planted around the perimeter of the backyard in front of the fence. And to get our grass a nice lush green. 

We'll definitely need to hire someone to do all this.

This is a dry-erase board that we've been writing on since our first summer in the house in 2014. It's in the closet of the kids' bedroom. Kids who stay at the house sometimes sign it and miraculously none of it has been erased by anyone yet! I'm interested to see how long this will last.

Crabs we caught.

Look closely...that's a crab clinging to a raw chicken breast being pulled up from the water!

We caught them off this boardwalk pier, which is one of my favorite spots on the Cape.

And that's a wrap on another great summer on the Cape! 

Inspiration at Homegoods

Every summer when I'm staying at my mom's house I go to Homegoods in Milford because I love that store! 

On my last trip there I found some good inspirational sayings on some of their office merchandise.

Okay, this one obviously wasn't in the office supplies section.

I love me a good bath!

I'm so glad that there's a Homegoods store opening at our mall here in Iowa soon!