July So Far.

I've decided Wisconsin summers are awesome. They are fantastic and possibly worth the months of freezing. On Fridays, I don't have class so I get to workout with my favorite. The girls and I meet up with Ross at the gym after he gets off work. Otherwise, he usually wakes up early and hits the gym before work. So Friday morning are also my favorite.

This morning, Ross got the girls up ad changed and turned on the Primary songbook playlist we have. Aoife played with the car, and Claire danced around singing with Ross. And I was barefoot in my robe in the kitchen cooking up pancakes, sausage, and eggs. Some mornings are just perfect. We've had a fantastic week and it's just really great to be in the place we're at. Life is wonderful. And it was just how a Friday morning should be.

The girls and I have been busy this week. The weather honestly couldn't be any better and I want to check as many things off of our summer bucket list. We have a pretty good routine going. We head to the gym first thing. While the girls nap, I clean. Then we have lunch and go out to explore.

This week we hit up the zoo, the arboretum, the Capitol, and downtown. I wish we could have stayed downtown longer, but the girls were exhausted, so we'll be doing the museums another day.

I love our little zoo. I love that it's free. We can come and go as we wish and I don't feel like we have to see everything and push the kids for a long afternoon.When they're tired, we go!

I've heard great things about the Arboretum, and I was hoping it would be like Washington Park back home. We didn't get to see a lot of it, but it didn't disappoint. But we did realize that Wisconsin has bugs. A lot of them. Especially on the trails by the lake. I sprayed myself and Claire with bug spray and it worked well for the first half. But poor Aoife was getting eaten alive and the way she sat in the carrier I couldn't help her. Halfway, the bugs started getting Claire. She'd walk with her hands over her ears and cry every now and then. I ended up picking her up and running with both girls to the car. But she enjoyed our little hike and couldn't wait to tell Ross about the bugs.

My poor bug bite baby.

After breakfast this morning, we headed downtown. Originally, I wanted to take the girls to the UW Geology museum, but could not find a parking spot to save my life. So we changed our plans and decided to check out the Capitol. I wanted to do a tour, but after seeing all of the stairs and no one else waiting for the tour would need to use the elevator, I decided to poke around on our own so we wouldn't make anyone wait for us.

Claire loved pushing the elevator buttons anyway and loved that she got to do it so many times as we checked out each floor. And she loved the acoustics and her voice echoing. I'm sure everyone in the building could hear us. But it was a really cool building. It was fun poking around looking at everything.

It was really bright.

Then we strolled down State street. We stopped off at Jamba Juice, since that's the only one around here. They even had kid's sizes. Of course the girls loved them and drank them as fast as they could. It's been fun finding all the things to do. And you can't really beat a Wisconsin summer.