Hynes Family: July Adventures in Portland

July was a great month for us!! Summer is so much fun with a pool to swim in, isn't it?!? Our new subdivision is about 4 times bigger than our last one, and they love to PARTY!! So, the Fourth of July was just that...a PARTY!!!

It started with a bike parade that the kids were so excited to participate in. They each picked out decorations from the dollar store, and sat in the hot garage to decorate their bikes all by themselves.

The rest of us got to sit back and enjoy the show.

Then they threw out WAY too much candy for the kids to gather up.

Then they lined the kids up according to age, and threw coins in the pool for them to gather: What the FUN?!?!?

Because we didn't have back-door neighbors at the time, we were able to enjoy about a dozen firework shows from our master balcony!! It was perfect for Elliott who doesn't love the noise, and Archie, who needed to go to bed because the it don'ts get dark until 10pm around here!!

And of course we can't forget our holiday breakfast bike-ride to McDonalds (that we actually did the next day so we wouldn't miss the bike-parade)!!

Not all our summer fun is outdoors...Archie loves playing with Elliott's Skylanders video game action figures, and since Elliott doesn't play anymore, he is happy to share. He gets very creative in his uses for them.

Man, this makes my Mommy-heart happy!!!

Ok, I think this post is bleeding over into August, but we'll just go with it. Mike had a 4 day weekend, his last one of the summer, so we did something we NEVER do...we were SPONTANEOUS!! We decided to head to Salem, Oregon to see my Sister Juliet, and it just happened to be the same weekend my parents and other Sister Alicia were visiting too!!!

Here we go!!!

Being a spontaneous sort of folk (at least for this weekend) we decided to cut the drive in half and stopped at our FIRST EVER MOTEL!!! It was a flashback to the road trips of my childhood in the 80s...Actually, I don't think this particular motel has changed much since the 80s. It was so fun!!! The kids loved the complimentary PopTarts for breakfast--hee hee!

What fun Salem is, especially when you have such a wonderful hostess and tour guide: thank you Aunt Juliet!! We visited the Capital building and it's gorgeous gardens...