First Day of Summer Vacation = 1st Family Meeting of The Season

Ahh, the first day of summer vacation.  The one day a year that D and I think we are going to go broke feeding everyone and we think the school lunch bill  "wasn't that bad".  Seriously, can a kid be that hungry all the time?  Times that by 8?  Eeks!

Big D and I discussed the summer last night and everything we had to do. We decided...it was time for a sit down session with our kids.  So I wrote a list and called a meeting for this morning and told everyone before they went to bed.  More eye rolling. Even some sighs were involved.

"If those eyes roll out of your head, you will have a hard time weeding grapes!"  I yelled after the last kid as she went to bed. 
"Sheesh, the attitudes," Ron said. 

Well we got everybody together after breakfast at about 7:30 this morning.  There was a lot of crying (Levi, Maggie, and Jessica aren't morning people.  Sleep in kids, come on!)  Then it happened.  Just as we got to the part about keeping up with yard chores, Maggie starts throwing up.  Did Cody pay her to do that?

So picture this:  We are all at the table, except for the few that ran to get a towel and puke pail, the others are eating like their sister didn't just throw up 4 feet from them and I'm trying to gain control of the crowd again.  Puking, crying, eye rolling and losing control.

"Hurry up, I have to get chores done," Big D said as I'm getting to the point about computer time and how we think they should have friends over.  He so didn't help the situation.  We did all agree on one thing as we sat through the barfing and screaming.  We're going to work for a 15 passenger van so we when we go somewhere we can all ride in one vehicle. 

Later today, we got all the blossoms cut off our Ginger Gold trees (except for a few), then cut all the blooms off the new strawberries and did a little weeding.  In these pictures we were planting black raspberries this afternoon.  So far we have 52 planted, and we have 98 left that we will get done tomorrow along with weeding some grapes. 

So to make a long story short, we got our point across, everybody retained their eyeballs and we actually got the kids remembering how much fun it is to work together as a team. Hopefully that's how our whole summer will go!

Happy Trails!
Suzanne

PS Yes that is Rachel wearing her church tights, a swim suit and rain boots.  I don't know either!