Mini Trip and a New Kitty!

Mike's sister Carrie had been fostering a mama cat with kittens for an animal rescue, until the kittens were old enough to be adopted. The mama cat came to her house pregnant, and had 5 kittens the next morning. The kittens have grown up and been adopted, but we really fell in love with the cute mama cat. We adopted her, and went on a little road trip to go pick her up. Carrie met up with us in Reno to give us mama cat, and then we drove back home. We decided to name mama cat Juno.

The kids had fun playing the Switch on the car ride - the drive was about 8 hours each way

Driving by the salt flats

Beverly Hills NV is a little different from Beverly Hills CA

Driving by some interesting rock formations

Some glorious clouds

We stayed overnight in a hotel

Meeting up with Carrie and Juno

Nora took good care of Juno on the ride back home. Juno doesn't like riding in cars, but she did ok.

We parked the car, and let her out of her carrier for a rest stop - there was a litter box back there

Arriving back home in the evening

Juno exploring the bathroom

Juno is so cute and small. We are letting her take her time getting used to us and our house before introducing her to any of the other pets. 

Glow Sticks

Mike got a deal on a big pack of glow sticks on Amazon, and we all had fun playing with them one night.

The kids decided to cover the swings with glow-chains

The kids trying out the glow swings, haha

The girls made big stacks of glow bracelets

Mike decided to make a stick-person out of glowsticks, and tape it to himself to make a moving stick-person

The kids thought that was so cool, and wanted to do it too, so we helped them get all suited-up

4th of July

On July 3, Hamilton, the filmed musical, became available to watch on Disney+. We watched it with Nora, who really likes musicals. It was really cool to see the original cast, and to be able to see everything so close up! It was a good lead up to 4th of July.

On the 4th, Nora made this cute patriotic display on our Animal Crossing island

The kids with Dorie

One of Dorie's very favorite foods is watermelon, so she appeared as soon as I started cutting it

The food!

It was a much smaller celebration than we normally have, but it was still fun. Hopefully next year we'll be able to have the whole family over again.

Dessert

While we were waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks, we tried out a new VR game that Mike got, called "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes." One person uses the VR set and they can see a bomb with different modules that are like puzzles. They describe the modules to the rest of the players who have the Bomb Defusal Manual, and they try to figure out how to solve the puzzle, and give instructions to the VR player on what to do. The goal is to solve all the module puzzles correctly to defuse the bomb before the timer goes off. It is pretty tricky, but fun! We all took turns being the VR player.

Max watched from the back of the couch

Playing some corn hole before fireworks

Our hanging baskets on the porch worked out pretty well this year!

The fireworks

Marolynn came over to watch with us

The kids doing sparklers - they were more torch-like this year for some reason

Doing another corn hole challenge

We took our chairs to the park to watch people setting off their big aerials

Back at home