17 Adventures!

I have to be careful. The last time I said that I wanted to make something "memorable", I ended up with a broken wrist.

And I don't often have original ideas. I usually find something that sounds good, then adapt it, and use it. Not this time. I can claim this one as my own idea.

So, our theme for this summer has been, "17 Adventures". I wanted to come up with some summer activities that would be fun for Emma, and different than everyday activities, so that at the end of the summer, we could say, "Look at all this fun stuff we did all summer long!"

I kind of picked, "17", because this is 2017. Not the best plan though, because I don't want to be upping our number of adventures each year after this! But 17 seemed like a nice, random, odd number, so I went with it.

To qualify for an "Adventure", it has to be something fun, something we don't do every day, and a lot of them are things that you would only do in the summertime. For example, one of Emma's adventures was going tubing on the river with some friends. Since we don't own a boat, this totally qualified for Emma. Because if we went boating every weekend, then that takes away some of the adventurous quality of it.

So, while we're not done yet, .... here are some of our 17 Adventures from this summer, and most of these are phone pictures -- that's what I tend to have with me.

Emma and I went to the grand opening of the new 2nd floor of the library. I have an abundance of opinions about the library that I will withhold. These photos will suffice for now:

(Original, restored, freight elevator in the old downtown building where the "new" library is located.)

Checking out the 3D printers. It was a lot of fun, ....

But THIS was our Adventure:

Virtual Reality.

What you see on the TV screen is what Emma saw in the goggles.

She had a lot of fun with that!!

We also signed her up for some classes at "Kids' College" at our local State College. She had a couple of favorite classes, .... one was Archery:

At home, she requested to have some "cooking classes" with Mom. Who am I to disagree with that?

This first is a glazed lemon loaf, a recipe that came from her cookbook. (Not a winner, but she chose it, and she loved the process.)

Emma helped again this year with the raspberry jam ...

(I'm kind of nostalgic about those two old Pyrex bowls. They were my mom's, and it feels so comfortable to use them!!)

Our trip to Utah to meet Baby Myra was at the top of her list. While we were there we went to the park with the grandkids:

Darcie planned the next Adventure, which was also during our Utah trip. I asked her to come up with a good, family hike that we could take the little kids & they would enjoy. Darcie definitely knocked this one out of the park!!

And to top it off, she & I went to a little place in downtown Provo, where they make kolaches -- a Polish filled pastry. We picked up a dozen, met the rest of the family at the trailhead, and had a really yummy breakfast of warm kolaches!! So GOOD!!

Fast forward a few weeks .....

We did a mother-daughter excursion to an antiques show/vintage market: 

And her other favorite Kids' College class was Fantasy Face Paint:

(That was the final day, when she painted my face, and I put the finishing touches on her face.)

Which brings us to this weekend.

We thought we'd have to miss out on our Shooting Star Sleepout for the Perseids meteor shower, but the weather worked out enough that we slept out last night and got to see a few meteors. It wasn't a lot this year -- just too much smoke from wildfires. But there was one brilliant streak that was way impressive.

At about 5 am, we had to make a dash for the camper when it started to spit rain on us.

But it TOTALLY counted for our Adventure!

There's more Adventures to show, but they're part of our 2017 Huffaker Family Reunion, so I'll save them for later.

17 Adventures might just be another name for a Summer Bucket List. I think by calling them, "Adventures", that it reminds Miss Emma that there's fun to be had all the time, and in a variety of ways.

I have a feeling that she's going to want to do this from now on, every summer. This could get challenging,  .... but it will definitely be FUN!!!