The Blandford Family: One Week And Counting..

We move in a week, our house looks like this, so I am guessing we won't be in it in a week. Which means one of our lucky parents will have 4 new house guests in a week! I think my parents are sitll recovering from when the 5 girls slept over last week :)

Despite our lives being consumed by the move, we actually are having an amazing summer so far. The girls both finished us their gymnastics classes and had their "shows" there, Lucy did 2 weeks of theatre camp, and we have had lots of laid-back sprinkler afternoons (they realized if it runs long enough we get a huge mud swamp in our yard and they make mud pies all afternoon and I have to give them a bath before their bath, and they give their toys a separate bath and give the bath tub a bath after, because of the amount of mud they bring in. It's SUPER fun.) We had a zoo day this week and our first official family trip to the pool (in Skokie) this afternoon The girls were in heaven. The city has a lot of great things, but the public pool is not one of them. Or the library or the Target on Elston.

The highlight of my summer thus far, minus the move which might be the highlight of my life when we get moved in and have a whole basement for toys, is that the girls are starting to play together. It's probably the most amazing thing that has every happened since Leigh has come along. Now that Leigh can ~~play~~ take direction, Lucy can't get enough of her. Tonight they spent a good 30 minutes in the shower playing some sort of game that was just opening the door, walking out and going back in. I wasn't sure how they could do this so long but they were playing together so whatever.

After about 10 years here in the city, it's officially our last weekend here. There's so much we love about it, mostly the fact that both of our girls were born here and we have such great memories of experiencing the city with Lucy over the past 4 years, and now with Leigh. Although Joe and I had been here years before the kids, experiencing it with kids was a million times better and we are lucky we had these years here with them. Yes, there is traffic like any city and there are a lot of inconveniences that comes with it (like having to pay for parking to take kids to their doctor and having to do a 6 point turn to get out of garage without hitting a garbage can) but being able to walk to camps, classes, restaurants, get downtown to the lake in 10 minutes, go to the museums and zoo whenever we had a few hours, and having a festival or event to take the kids to any weekend we were free far outweighs the annoyances. It will always feel like home to us and we love that our first house was here.

But, I love that our next house will be the one the girls remember, and where they have all their childhood memories at.

Lots of pics, just a few highlights from the summer so far...

Summer Camp - Fairy Tale Magic