Thankful

This last week has been beautiful.  I've been enjoying seeing my friends' pictures of 4th of July on Facebook, and isn't it so great?  I love the summer holiday.  The campground we were staying at - Priest Lake State Park in Idaho, had a lot of great reminders about our country, as well as fun activities, so we enjoyed spending the 4th there.  Here, our kids were participating in the 4th of July parade that went around the campground.

Later in the day, we participated in a sand castle competition at the state park.  After having seen a sand castle competition on the beach in Oregon, it was fun to try to build a sculpture of our own.  As you can see, Priest Lake is beautiful.  We loved it!

Giving us great memories of the ring of fire on Conesus Lake in New York, there were fireworks being set off all around Priest Lake.  This was a really fun way to spend our evening!  We've camped on the 4th before, but most campgrounds don't seem to allow fireworks.  This was a great park!  The activities director / camp host did such a great job, it's making us think about camp hosting next summer for a month.  We'll see!

We're no longer staying in one place for a week now that we need to travel back across the country, so we've moved on to Montana.  I was looking forward to this for awhile, because we got to see my cousin, Jocelyn, and her family.  The scenery in Montana is beautiful, but it's also just beautiful to be able to spend time with cousins.

Here's Jocelyn and Scott's cute cabin.  Their property is great, and we love log cabins.  This place is so wonderful.  Plus, what could be better than watching your nine kids have a blast together?

The big boys spent a good deal of time shooting BB guns.  They loved it.

We got to take a walk around Jocelyn's property.  So nice!  We also walked to the neighbors' house, and they let us hold a baby bunny, pet the baby goats, and learn all about chickens, should we want to raise them in Ohio.

After a nice picnic with the cousins, we all went out of MacGregor Lake.  At this lake, you put a piece of bacon on your fishing line, and the crawdads grab it.  Our kids loved fishing this way!

Here are the results.  The other result is that the song, "You get a line and I'll get a pole, we'll go fishin' in the crawdad hole…" is stuck in my head.  So fun!

Here, the kids show how big the crawdads were that they caught.  :)  It was a fantastic time with cousins.  As I watched all the kids play this last week, I was so thankful for these opportunities we're having.  We get to see the beautiful wonders God created, and we get to see cousins that are far away, but now the kids have a chance to know each other.  I couldn't be more thankful.