The Hawks Family Circus: Highlights from our summer :)

I can hardly believe that summer is already over, falls has begun, and we've already seen our first flurries. For the first time ever, this past summer seemed to go on forever. We had a great summer and a wonderful start to the school year. Since I have been avoiding blogging for the past four months (whoops!) I thought I should give a few highlights from our summer before I share about how our first six weeks of homeschooling have been going.

-- Michael played community baseball with his good friend, Bradyn.

-- Michael ran his first 1-mile race with Grandpa Lovey and Liliana ran her first 1/2 mile race with me. Afterwards, Liliana told me she never wanted to run again. :)
-- We went to the annual Hawks family reunion in central Minnesota and spent a long weekend in Wisconsin with our wonderful friends, the Wynjas. Sammy and Sadie are learning to be better travelers.

-- We had Sammy and Sadie dedicated at church

Following the dedication we had a big party to celebrate!

--Michael lost his 3rd tooth. He got it stuck in a cob of corn which made it wiggly. After that, it wasn't too long before it fell out. He chased me around the house trying to show me how he could wiggle it. There is nothing grosser to me than wiggly teeth.

-- Liliana learned to ride her bike with no training wheels. Yay, Liliana!
--We celebrated the 4th of July with our good friends, the Coles. For the first year ever we went to the Eagan parade instead of the Apple Valley parade. I have a feeling this will be a new tradition.

-- We decided to start cutting processed foods out of our diet. First on our list was to stop buying bread and start making our own. There is nothing more delicious than freshly baked bread!

--We celebrated Sammy and Sadie's being home for 6 months and a few days later their 2nd birthday. We had a huge party, which we planned to be outside with bounce houses. However, that Saturday was the coldest, windiest, rainiest day of the summer. We still had tons of fun, though! We decided to do a hotdog bar, which I didn't think would be a huge deal. However, the response we got from our guests was incredible. Everyone thought it was the greatest idea! We had a huge assortment of toppings for the hotdogs. :)

Here is Matt grilling a gazillion hotdogs.

Sadie and Sammy with all their gifts. They were so sad when we kept taking their new toys away to hand them another gift to open.

Friends and family at the birthday party - watching S&S open their gifts.

Happy Birthday, Sadie and Sammy! :)

-- I witnessed a man get pulled over and arrested at gun point from our family room window. Talk about scary! I later found out he was arrested after a high speed chase.

-- Michael and Liliana played community soccer this summer. They both had a blast! Here is Liliana running past Michael to get the ball. A rare sight as Michael was the one who usually had the ball.

As you can see, Liliana was thrilled to be having her picture taken after their last game. They both did a great job.

-- We traded in Matt's red Mazda and our white van and upgraded to a new (used) car for Matt and a 11-passenger van for me. Yup, that's right, I'm living the high life now, driving around all high and mighty in my "nin nan" as Sammy calls it (aka big van). We decided to upgrade to the big van (which was so generously given to us as a fundraiser for our adoption) because we decided to complete the training necessary to become foster parents!