Summer in a Week

My goal this week was to cram all the fun summer activities we missed out on into Jeff's one week off. Here we go...

We started off with a nice, summer walk. Jeff wanted to walk on this trail I hadn't been on before. I was surprised to find the trail took us by a pond. As soon as Eli saw the water, he started saying, "Du, Du!" (Duck.) I had to crush his tiny hopes and dreams by saying, "Oh, yeah Eli, when we went on a walk with Leslie and Izzy there were ducks in the pond, but this pond doesn't have ducks."

Heartbreak.

Little did I know there WERE ducks just around the corner! I think it's so cute to take kids to go feed ducks and I was practically shaking in joy at the realization that Eli and I discovered our very own duck herd to feed.

If they can't see the food, they don't bother waiting around for it.

But as soon as you pull out those graham crackers again, they turn right back around. They were so friendly.

We let Eli roam the trail with us. Complete with a hiking stick.

And when we got home, we had our cabinets there to haunt us.

After a day or so of painting, we spent a day cleaning up the house and getting caught up on our yard work.

Okay, this might just be the cutest thing Eli does right now. Any time I say, "Eli, where is ..." he puts his hands up like this and starts looking around for whatever I mentioned. Melts my heart.

And this is what he does when he finds a bug. He is very interested in bugs.

This is when he helped us pull weeds. Meaning he would pull the buds off that plant and put them in the weed bucket. Such a good helper.

Eli was such a show off for Jeff this week. He was so happy Jeff was home to play with him all day. One day Eli tried for about fifteen minutes to put Jeff's flip flop on. He would inch his little toes up into the shoe, but managed to get his feet all twisted in the shoe every time. Then he would grunt in frustration. Such a goof.

We spent an evening in Logan that you can read about here.

Then on Thursday we went to the Hogle Zoo.

I have a bunch of old beanie babies that are now Eli's favorite toys. He is getting good at fetching out whatever animal we ask him to fetch. He even knows a lot of the sounds the animals make. So I figured with all his beanie baby love, he'd be sure to eat up seeing these animals life-size.

Sadly, this was probably the most exciting thing to Eli at the zoo:

Although, he did enjoy his first glimpse of a monkey.

You can't go to the zoo without comparing your wingspan with a gorilla's.

Jeff was impressed and/or shocked at my measurements.

Eli's got my gorilla genes.

See.

I thought he was the cutest little monkey at the zoo.

And then we returned to our never-ending project once again.