A friend that Jeff works with, Patti, sent a bag of fresh green beans home with him from work this week – I think he said they were from her daddy’s garden.  Yesterday Mason helped me get them ready to put on the stove.  Yum, yum.  I can remember snapping green beans with my grandmother & aunts when I was visiting them in the summer, and I didn’t love doing it much.  I’m not going to lie – Mason felt about the same way, so he didn’t do much more than this one lap full.  Most of his morning was spent marching around with sticks and chasing frogs.  Still, it gave him a taste of the experience :-).

There’s not much cuter than a lisping six-year-old 🙂

This past Sunday was a big one for our Charlie.  He received his third grade Bible with the rest of his Sunday school classmates at their church in Rock Hill.  Jeff & I, along with Meg and Little Hope, and Sherri, who happened to be in town for a visit, headed over to be there for the big day. Boo joined us for big church.  It started out with a Pancake Blast for breakfast, & then we walked Charlie & Adam to their new Sunday school classes.  AND we joined Andrew in his Sunday School class, Boo & Shea’s beloved Genesis Class that they have been members of their entire adult lives.  Here is the poster that was outside Charlie’s classroom, welcoming him and his buddies…

The plate from the inside front cover of Charlie’s Bible.  I’m not sure how long it has been a practice in the Methodist Church to give Bibles to third graders, but I know my children all got one, and my siblings and I all got one.  I’ll have to check with Momma to see if she remembers if she did.  Just a very special day.

Saturday morning, when the kids woke up, Jeff was already out burning, trying to beat the heat.  He called on his cell phone by about 7:30 to tell me he had a fire going, if anyone wanted to go down & join him.  Needless to say, we had several takers.  They helped pick up sticks & add them to the fire, like June is doing here, and just had a big time.

Last night four of the six grandbabes spent the night – Mallory & Clara already had plans to go with Rick & Emma to the high school football game – and we tinted some flowers.  Normally we do this every summer with Queen Anne’s Lace that grows in abundance up & down our road, but this year I just never thought about it until the flowers had come & gone.  So this week when I was in the grocery I noticed they had their cut flowers on sale, so I got a few for us to try.  Here is June putting her flower in the yellow food coloring that she chose to color her first one.

We checked before we went to bed – just a couple of hours after we’d started the process – & they were already starting to show signs of some color.  The kids were SO excited.  Good times 🙂

This was taken on our way to Uncle John’s funeral Tuesday morning when we were in Indiana – the men of the family.  At least these generations…

On our way to Madison we stopped by Mark’s job site in New Washington.  He had to drop a couple of things off, & Christopher was there working, so we got to see him for just a little while.  They have reroofed this building – they had to use a cherry picker to roof the cupola! – and are restoring it and building an addition.  It was originally the New Washington School – actually I think David said it very first was a Masonic Lodge – and now is being turned into a restaurant.  It’s a neat old building.

We got back late last night – actually early this morning – from a quick 48 hour trip to Indiana, for the visitation and funeral for Jeff’s Uncle John.  Dennis came by & picked us up Sunday night about ten, & we drove all night to get there.  Went to breakfast with Jeff’s mom & dad, & then took a nap for a couple of hours before we headed up to Madison for visitation.  As always with a family funeral, it was sad and wonderful and emotional and beautiful.  We saw cousins that I hadn’t seen in ten years, I don’t think -and Jeff’s mom and her sisters saw a cousin they hadn’t seen in ***fifty*** years.

The people at the funeral home were so nice, as it always seems that they are, and they had fixed up this beautiful display of items Johnny had brought about Uncle John’s life: his fireman’s uniform and Knights of Columbus cape, awards that he’d won, and some of the beautiful flowers that folks had sent. The man you can see was one of the Knights of Columbus who was standing guard at the foot of the casket, as they did the entire evening during visitation. It was a lovely tribute to a great guy.

Yesterday was the last day that Charlie & Adam will be here this summer, so we headed to Charlotte, to Freedom Park, for a picnic and to spend a few hours.  It was great.  I had not been there in years (decades?), and it was so nice.  A friend I work with had told me about the locomotive that was there that the kids could check out, and the boys had fun with that.

When I got on the computer yesterday morning to check out exactly where Freedom Park was in Charlotte, I noticed they had something called the NFL Play60 Kid Zone there.  I’d never heard of that, so wasn’t expecting much, but the boys ended up playing there for probably over an hour.  Among other things – my camera batteries died so I didn’t get as many pictures as I normally would have – they had a place where you could make a picture for your own football card.  Here are Char & Adam with their best game faces on :-).  It was a good day.

After we made the shadow puppets, the girls were adamant that I leave all the supplies out so Charlie & Adam could have a turn at making them when they got here yesterday.  And sure enough, they liked making them, and putting on the shows, as much as their cousins did.  Unfortunately it was a much sunnier day outside, so the shadows didn’t show up as well, but the fun factor was about the same 🙂

After lunch & nap, we headed over to Charlotte’s house, for what will probably be our last day of swimming this summer – school starts back next week.  Adam and her granddaughter Brenna really play nicely together in the pool, which lets the bigger kids play in the deep end as much as they want.  Good times.