bikes

So this has been a great summer of firsts for us. I took all 6 kids for a week of camping all by myself. Ava had 13 horse back riding lessons. Ellie lost her first teeth and Lauren had braces put on hers. The older girls are taking piano lessons, will learn to swim in a few weeks and they taught themselves to ride bikes.



Up until 3 years ago, we lived in apartments. There was nowhere to ride or store bikes so the girls never learned how to ride. A great friend gave us a bike and in the course of one weekend, they were off and riding just fine. We took them to our Goodwill Outlet store and found 3 almost brand new bikes; one for Lauren, one for Maddie and one for Ellie. Ava kept the gifted bike.



We were just about to buy Ellie training wheels when she surprised us by riding all by herself. They are having a ball and we go nightly to the school behind our house and ride, ride, ride. Grae and Molly spend the time playing on the playground.



This has been a very busy and expensive summer, and fall is shaping up to be the same way. We'll replace horse riding lessons with girls choir and bike riding with tearing up the upstairs. We're crazy.

Oh and our house appraisal went through fine. We needed to get $220,000 and the appraiser valued our house at $259,000. Wow! We bought the house for $185,000 three years ago so we were happy! This house has a lot of our blood, sweat and tears in it and we love it.

I finished Grae and Molly's quilts and I will show them later. Love picking fabrics for the quilts - sewing them, not so much. I found it boring sewing straight lines but the free motion quilting was fun. I made many errors but you can't tell without really staring at it so that's good! Well, off to sew diapers.