The summer of swimming

Since we started talking about painting Rachel and Annie's room, Megan was determined to have her room painted, too. So we prepped it Monday fixing many holes in the wall and the door, then painted Tuesday. I got one gallon of paint, but it was really close to me needing to go get a little more to have full coverage. But we managed to get it covered well enough that it won't bother me, so I didn't end up going and getting another pint. My mom helped paint, and Megan and Annie were both excited to be in on the work for part of the time, too.

 As long as I had all the paint stuff out and the new carpet is coming next week, I figured it was a good time to go touch up Ryan's walls, too. We painted the back of his door blue with white fluffy clouds to look like the sky. Then I went around the wall getting all the marks and pen and holes so by the time I was done it looked like his room was mostly freshly painted, too. All in a day's work.

Thursday Megan's friend, Emma, came over for a playdate. Megan has been looking forward to this for a long time, so she was super excited that Emma's mom was ready to let her come out to a playdate.

 They played in the back yard for a while running through the kid car wash, then came inside and did a treasure hunt Ryan had set up for them. They also played with blocks for a long time and enjoyed some time playing in Megan's bedroom. As the youngest Megan doesn't always get to choose who we do playdates with so she's always super happy when she does get a playdate just for her.

We've had some really awesome people offer to let us swim in their pools. Our neighbor, Manny, said we could come swim whenever we want, even with all the kids' cousins along, making 10 kids plus adults. So we swam there last Monday. Then Wednesday Mary Spear invited us to her pool. She has a diving board and some floating toys and they had a great time. And finally on Friday Sue Wagner in our ward had invited Savannah's kids to come and said the rest of the clan was welcome, too. As we left she said we are welcome to come swim any time since she only uses it in the mornings to swim laps, and she's happy to have it get more use out of it.

 We are so grateful to such generous people willing to let us swim since that's really the only thing outdoors we can do right now, because 1. it's so stinking hot, and 2. everything is closed because of Coronavirus.

Between swimming at all the friend's pools, and swim team T/Th/S, a lot of the kids swam every single day last week (except Sunday).

Thursday night Grandma invited all the grandkids to her house for a sleepover. Apparently after swim team is the perfect time since all the kids are so worn out they fell asleep pretty fast and made it an easy night for Grandma. I loved this picture of Megan and Peyton walking home after swimming Friday morning:

 Those girls love each other so much and really get along great all the time. We are so blessed to have so many cousins live where we can see them often.

 Strawberries are on sale this week, and after swimming Saturday night Jacob had a bunch of fruit waiting for the kids to devour. Nutella was out, too, so the kids took advantage of some delicious strawberries with Nutella.

 Megan really enjoyed it. I'm not sure how she enjoyed it all the way to her forehead, though.

More random coordination for church. Today was flower day, I guess:

 The kids' big kick recently is Hatchimals colleggtibles. They use their allowance to keep buying more and more. I guess it's better than buying candy. And they actually keep very careful track of them. Rachel decided to lay out every single one of her Hatchimals to see what she's got.

The other kids don't have nearly this much each, but between the 3 of them they may have nearly this much again.