My Top Five for Summer - By Anna

Hi!! Welcome back to TAJ. I hope you've been enjoying our posts!

As you probably know, Triniti and I switched weeks this month, the reason being that I had a camping trip the weekend I was supposed to post and so wasn't able to finish my post in time. Triniti agreed to switch with me on really short notice. It's great when you share a blog with your best friends. :)

And now to the meat of my post. I finished school (kinda) on Friday, April 29th. I've still got some math and Constitutional Literacy that I fell a bit behind on during the school year. Plugging away on those, but I'm almost done! I wrote a summary of my favorite subjects at my other blog that you can check out here.

So I was brainstorming (and this was at the point when I thought I was posting May 9th) and I thought what better to do than a kind of follow up post about summer. So I looked through our calendar for this summer, and below are my top five things I'm most excited for. The first two are events, and the last three are more activities.

1) VBS

I'm becoming a VBS addict. It is literally the thing I look forward to the whole year. Last year I almost, almost cried when it was over. It is always so epic and makes me feel so special to be a part of it. I love helping out, and am hoping to be in crafts this year. I was in crafts last year, and it was awesome. Crafts was always my favorite part of VBS, and I remember always going to a certain person's table every time. What was really sweet was that last year, several of the kids came to my table every time, and I was thinking how strange it is to be the person they look up to, the same as I looked up to my craft table teacher! Snacks was my second choice, though, and that should be really fun if I can't get crafts. Snacks is awesome for two reasons. One, you're right by the sanctuary, so you can listen to the songs and the skit without having to rush back early to get to your room on time. Second, you can pilfer the snacks and eat 'em sometimes. :)

2) July Trip

In July we're doing a road trip/family reunion/plane flight out to and around the Michigan area. We'll leave in early July, spend a week or so with my dad's family (my grandma, uncle, aunt and cousins), then spend a few days with my grandma's extended family. After that, we'll do a week(ish) long road trip hitting Columbus, Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York, New York; and Boston, Massachusetts. It'll be so much fun!! We've done two road trips before. One in 2014, when we did a month-long one around most of the U.S., and a second in late summer 2015, when we went along the bottom of the U.S. and down to Florida. So I've done road trips before, and I love driving and looking at things and seeing all the cool history there is all around our great country!!

3) Reading

I love to read. I can not stress that enough. I'm obviously going to read this summer. But specifically, I want to read a lot of informative books. My main goal, however, is to read all of the Narnia books. I've listened to people read them countless times, so much so that I practically have them memorized, but I've never actually read the books myself. Right now I'm in the middle of The Silver Chair. I've read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" and The Last Battle. I also recently finished a series by Randy Alcorn (which contains the books Deadline, Dominion and Deception) and that was a really good read. 

4) Crafts

I'm a pretty crafty person, and I'm looking forward to doing a bunch of stuff. Mom's made a 'use it or lose it' bin, which basically means that if we don't use it by the end of the summer, she's gonna toss it. There's quite a few things in there I'd totally forgotten about that will be fun to do. I've also found some pretty neat crafts on Pinterest that I want to try, mostly sewing type crafts.

5) Piano

I like to play the piano, and I'm hoping to get better this summer. I have a Keith and Kristyn Getty book that I got a while ago, and I want to learn how to play most of the songs in that. I also want to brush up on a few of my old favorites. My teacher will also probably give me some fun ones to do over the summer.

So there it is. The five things I'm most excited about for summer! There are other things, such as spending time with friends, and my cousin's visit from Florida to Cali, but I trimmed it down to five things...

Hope you enjoyed! Be sure to check back next week for another post, and I'll be posting again on June 6th.

What are you looking forward to this summer?

~Anna