Summer 2018 Comes to a Close

Well, the summer finally came to a close.

I want to thank anyone who followed all these blog entries and enjoyed the time I spent with my daughter over the summer.

It was a summer of high flying rockets, minecraft creations, church functions, fat free yogurt, stargazing, and just watching my daughter be a 12 year old girl.

I made a Minecraft model of a lot of the things that were part of the summer for my daughter. We sat down and went through each spot. Maybe she'll look at them in the future, maybe not. I had fun making the map over the summer though! She seemed to be pleased with it as well!

Thanks again for reading!

(First day of Seventh Grade!)

July Roundup

Since Elizabeth's birthday, summer has been going well.
I remember my summer when I was her age. It was all about riding my bike to the mall, looking at PC games, and collecting baseball cards. I guess what's different now is that she and I spend all our time together, whereas I wasn't too inclined to seek my parents attention a lot (they were constantly working and I was going in a much different direction than Elizabeth).

One thing we do constantly is go out and eat, and mom has been taking me and Elizabeth out to a yogurt place a whole lot. It's called Del'ishi and they make really good frozen yogurt.

My wife and I are spending a bit of time with Elizabeth. We've spent a couple of days out of the past two weeks with her together, and I feel blessed and thankful that my wife and her stepdaughter can bond together, laugh, and joke around.

My mom bought these rockets that fly into the air really high a while back. We brought them out
just this summer (they were purchased a year ago!) and Elizabeth has taken to them. More than
a few days since we brought them back, she's asked "Can we go fly the rockets?" They were such a
thing that mom bought us some SUPER HIGH FLYING ROCKETS. I love playing with these things with my daughter.

Church is a feature of my daughter's life, which I'm thankful for. I'm glad the Lord has made
church important to her, and she's fitting into the class there well. They visited a trampoline park in High Point called "Get Air" and she enjoyed it.

Creativity is not in short supply with my daughter! Back when she was a toddler and on up in her years, she's been a fan of Minecraft. Recently we brought back a map that we worked on a long time ago, and updated it to actually include an aquarium! I love having these shared projects that we work on together. I told her bringing out these maps was like looking at models we've made together.

So summer is coming along, it bring back memories and gives me a bit of nostalgia, and so far Elizabeth has been a really happy girl, and above all I thank the Lord for helping forge these family memories.

Summer continues for me and my daughter!

Since last time, we've found different ways of.keeping ourselves busy.

Elizabeth isn't the biggest fan of board games, but we came up with a way to make the game "Sorry Sliders" a bit more interesting. I mentioned before that she likes characters created by certain YouTube people. In this case they come.from a yiutuber named Markiplier. What made this so interesting is that I printed out the faces of the characters and glued them onto the pieces that you use to play "sorry sliders".

It was a hit, and we ended up using the game board and the sliders for other things.

A lot of good moments otherwise have happened. We've been enjoying the company of family members including Elizabeth's cousin Christian!

Going to restaurants is something we do a lot. My takes both of us put quite frequently. We regularly visit IHOP, and recently went to a restaurant where I had the best Philly Cheesesteak I've ever eaten!

Something pretty big is a mask Im making for Elizabeth. She enjoys something called " Fursuiting", which involves making costumes based on fixtional, animal themed characters. I've made her a mask before, but for the past 9 months I've been working on a mask for a character called a "Dutch Angel Dragon". This character has distinctively large ears, cheeks, and a peculiar looking nose. 

And finally, Elizabeth's birthday was this month! One of the things we did for her was throw a big party. She made out really big! A lot of our relatives visited and every one brought Elizabeth a gift. It was a great way to end a wonderful month!

June almost out??? Here's a rundown!

A great summer so far, June in a nutshell!!!

Well, Elizabeth is glad to be out of school, but we've made the most of our time!

Early this summer, Elizabeth really took to making craft bracelets for herself and her friends. She has always had an interest in making crafts and seeking to make a little money by doing so. Before school was out, we were making a lot of bags (kind of like shoulder hand bags) that were based on styles of certain YouTube personalities.

A great time was had when we finally made it up to Celebration Station in Greensboro! We had planned to ride Go Karts, but Elizabeth decided she would rather play video games. It was a good idea because Celebration Station was home to one of those gigantic claw machines! Claw machines have always been a fascination of Elizabeth's.

I've tried to get her into activities that both of us can take part in. It wasn't that long ago that her interests have shifted away from our long time go to activities such as a video game called Garry's Mod, and Minecraft, another hugely popular video game. But there were three activities which were a great success. One was an art project that we both took part in, a 3D picture featuring characters from  game called Five Nights at Freddie's. I did a lot of the line drawing, Elizabeth did a lot of the coloring and we both put our signature at the bottom.

Also, she made her own contribution to a series of drawings I did during a time when we focused on art. Finally, we both worked on a small Minecraft project that ended up looking pretty nice! It features a character she likes called "The Host".  She did the border and the face, I put water under the whole thing and made the letters for "The Host".

How could I forget Father's Day??? The whole family (Me, my mom, my dad, my daughter, and my dad's two other sons and their family) went out to a great steak house a few towns over.

Anyway, summer has been a blast for both of us so far, and I'm looking forward to what's to come!

Welcome Summer 2018!

The purpose of this blog is to document the time spent during the summer of 2018 with my daughter.
Maybe it'll be a blessing to someone out there, maybe it'll spark some ideas in others for their family.

Hopefully it'll be something that me and my daughter can look back on to bring back memories in days to come.