Lauren wanted chocolate cake with chocolate frosting,
Look at all those cute kids. They came over and had a BBQ (hotdogs, chips, relish tray, soda) played outside, and then tried (unsuccessfully) to watch a movie.
They must have had a good time because days later I was finding Skittles behind things in the front room.
Here is the only shot of Lauren and I together, and I didn't even have it taken. I'm glad someone else thought of it.
The girls were able to go kayaking on Seneca Lake. The day the Second Year and Third Year Level girls went it was windy and choppy, but all made it back safely - even though a few capsized.
There was archery and trap shooting at camp this year. The girls really enjoyed it.
We went hiking up Buttermilk Falls in Ithaca, NY. It was beautiful. There were approximately 600 stairs in the first part of the hike. Fortunately it was cool, so we didn't get too hot.
After hiking at Buttermilk Falls we drove to Robert H. Treman State Park where the girls could go swimming. It was an amazing natural swimming hole with a deep end that had a diving board and roped off swimming areas.
Here's Lauren with Michele and Jenny.
She decided she could do this for her Divine Nature Value Project. So once she was done with school we got the socks, rice, and ribbon and she made 12 snuggle socks. One for each unit in the stake.
This is what they looked like before she put the unit's name on the sock.
Making strawberry jam takes almost a whole day. We left at 8:15 am to go to the berry farm and pick our 12 quarts of strawberries. Yes, it was hot and muggy, and the berries were tiny. The farm worker said that they'd had a lot of people pick the day before and they'd gotten all the big berries, so that made it take a little longer than normal. That and the fact that we were down to just Lauren and I doing the picking. Then we had to go buy the sugar and pectin. Then it was home to cut up, mash, and make the strawberry jam. We made ten batches of jam. In the middle of making it Lauren had to leave to take a Regents exam so it took me a little longer to finish since I was working alone.
When Lauren got home from her exam around 2:30 pm she started helping again and we got done around 4:00 pm. On the counter you can see some of our 30+ jars of strawberry freezer jam. Justin happened to be here interviewing for a job, so we sent a couple jars back with him. One for them and one for Brett. It's truly a labor of love - of strawberry jam love, that is. Nothing tastes better!
