monday morning

Our last Monday morning of this summer.
Next Monday I'll have a quiet house to myself. Well, myself and a one-year-old.
But the big kids will be back at school.
They'll be back in school about 48 hours from now, actually.
Crazy how fast this (unusually short) summer went.
I'm not ready to say goodbye yet.

Although a quiet(er) house will be kind of nice. ;)

We had a a busy weekend...
Friday we had a few friends over for games and pool.  And the Olympic ceremony.
And this yummy, yummy Snickerdoodle Dip.  YUM
(if you do the snickerdoodle version -which you should- start with one tablespoon of cinnamon and work up to taste.  i think i only used just over one tablespoon and i thought it was plenty cinnamonny.)(we dipped graham cracker sticks, nilla wafers, pretzels, strawberries and apple slices)(my favorites were pretzels and apples)(did I mention, yum?)

Saturday we took the kids to the Adventure Science Center. It's about that time of the summer where everyone's just trying to get away from the heat outside, so science center it was.  Afterward, we spent the afternoon running a few last school-prep errands.  Ryan's out of town all this week so I wanted to be sure we had everything squared away and I didn't have too much last minute running around to do on my own with three kids and the chaos of the new school year kick-off this week.

Sunday we went to church.  Which usually isn't so unusual, except that this week was the first time we'd actually sat in the service since the first part of May. !!!  Between vacation and weekend trips and being crazy sick this summer, we've only until now been to church twice since early May and both those times we were volunteering in the nursery.  So it was really good to be back to worship and hear our pastor speak.  It'd been way too long!
Our neighbors joined us for church and then we all went out to lunch at one of our favorite nearby, yummy bbq places.  And seriously half of our church turned up there as well.  Kinda fun. :)

After all that, we came home to nap the baby, clean up the house and get ready for BOOK CLUB!
Savannah and I are starting up a Mother/Daughter book club and we're so excited!  We've invited a couple of girls from SJ's class last year, a couple of girls from church, a few girls from the neighborhood we're hoping to get to know better, plus SJ's teacher from last year as she has a daughter Savannah's age and they just moved in down the hill and around the corner from us.

Yesterday was our first get together... just for everyone to meet and hang out and discuss a plan for our club.  We played some fun, icebreaker, get to know each other type games, made some fun, easy-peasy bookmarks (just hot-glued buttons and ribbon!) and of course had the all important book club snacks.  (Again with the Snickerdoodle dip!)(and I am already looking for an excuse to make another batch!!)

We had a total of 10 gals; five pairs of moms and daughters, with as many as five more on the docket!  We figure a nice big group is good, because not everyone will be able to make it every time.  And while it'll be fun to share new books and the girls are excited about reading, mostly I'm just in it to make new friends, so the more the merrier!!
I bombed at taking pictures while our friends were here... here are a couple (sorry, blurry ones) SJ snapped that she wanted me to add:

And here's the book SJ picked to start off our book club reading for next month in case anyone wants to follow along...

And I bet you can't guess what we already have planned to serve for yumminess next time. ;)