Behind the Curtain

A brief recap of our summer adventures

Summer is always too short.

It’s not that summer is my favorite season, it’s just that my list of things we ‘ought’ to do in summer would always take about 12 months to complete. We’ve tried to balance the go-go-go of camps, vacations, rehearsals, and schoolwork with lazy river afternoons, playdates, camping trips, and family dinners. This summer was no different lots of things we wanted to do and only so many days to do them – but here are some of the highlights of both the busy and mundane.

To kick off the summer shenanigans Dillon took a trip to visit his Aunt & Uncle in New Mexico. Mostly he ate his weight in spicy food- but he also learned some woodworking skills, painted, designed a shirt, and enjoyed the endless sunshine to find sparkly rocks. LOTS of ROCKS.

Theater- easily our biggest commitment this summer was Adirondack Center Stage’s summer workshop production of Annie. The summer production commitment is Monday -Friday 9a-3p, plus a few weekend days. It is a full time gig for 5 weeks for this quadruple. The friends and memories are priceless, but it certainly has a toll on our summer galivanting.

Between rehearsals we kept up with our biking – Ainsley and Grayson completed the Rapid River Fondo – a 36 mile bike ride in the Adirondacks.

The six of us continued to hang out at our local climbing gym. Dillon was excited to start competing this year in USA Climb Competitions. However, competition divisions are divided by age and he took up climbing “late in life”. Okay, not really, but the skills necessary to compete as a teenager often rely on you having years of climbing experience. Dillon started climbing just over a year ago, but he and coach extraordinaire Cody took up the challenge of getting him comfortable getting on – and perhaps more importantly – falling-off the wall.

We managed one camping trip this summer. A family riverside trip to PA where 26 of us ate, laughed, ate, rafted, ate, and got sunburnt together.

Then we were back to New York for some more bike racing…

Mid August came with a slight curveball- Ainsley broke her foot. This was just before we were headed to Oklahoma and Arkansas for some more fun on bikes. I’ll try to do a whole post on our trip – but it was bucket filling for all of us.

And lastly, Rayleigh joined the world of the driving – celebrating with a drive-thru experience.

Summer was wonderful. Full of love and laughter and memories, more rainy days that I had hoped, and as much fun as I think I could have packed into the few short weeks.