Summer Trip to Florida

Shortly after school got out, the girls and I headed to Florida to visit my family for 8 days.  As usual it was a busy week and unfortunately my parents were still working but we also had a lot of fun despite a lot of rain.

The girls got to swim a couple of times between the rain and they got to have swim lessons once.  We had hoped to get in a few more swim lessons but we had to reschedule 3 times.  Their swim teacher, Ms. Karen, is the same one who taught my sister and me to swim and she also taught Emma Catherine to swim a couple of years ago.  Bailey doesn't like water in her face so we were hoping she would cooperate for swim lessons, and she did great and even put her head in the water a few times.  Emma Catherine worked on her swimming strokes and did well also.

While I was home, we celebrated my dad's birthday and mine as well.  My sister flew in for the weekend and we enjoyed tacos and a yummy but very rich dessert from pinterest.  It had a layer of homemade chocolate chip cookies, a layer of double stuffed oreos, and a layer of brownies on top all baked together and then we ate it with ice cream.

 Another day we went to the park with my aunt and Papa.

The next day, my aunt took the girls and me on a special outing.  We went to play with the puppies at the Southeastern Guide Dogs.  These puppies will hopefully go on to help blind people and they allow people to come in and play with the puppies most mornings of the week as part of their training.  The girls loved it and are still talking about the cute lab puppies they played with!

This year my dad decided to retire from teaching.  It was a very hard decision for him but he felt it was best, and I'm so proud of him.  He has touched a lot of people over the years and I was so glad that we were able to be at his school retirement party with the other 3 teachers that were retiring.  They had another one for the whole county that we weren't in town for, so I was glad to be in town for this one. They gave him a Nook as his retirement gift.

Before we left we went to dinner with Papa and my parents one last time.

Another fun week for us and it just makes me so thankful for my family!