Home again, home again!

{all the cousins together}

We arrived home late Sunday night after a little over a week in Ohio to visit hubby's parents.  It was really, really nice to get away, but also really, really good to get home again!  Usually our vacation ends up being toward the middle/end of summer, but this year it worked out best for everyone to go at the beginning of summer, and we liked it!  The weather out there was cooler for most of the week, which was really nice.  And now we have the rest of the summer stretching ahead of us, instead of school just around the corner.  (I realize that time will be here before I know it . . . but for now I'm basking in the relaxed feeling of little-to-no schedule. :))

I came home from vacation feeling "fluffy," having exercised no self-control over my eating and having gained about 5 lbs!  Oops . . . Today I got back on the treadmill for the first time in 2 weeks, and ran/walked 1.5 miles.  I don't think I'm going to accomplish my goal of 3.2 miles by the end of the month, however, it feels good to be getting back on track.  Hopefully those few little pounds will vanish quickly too.  :)

We awoke to find a bear in our yard this morning, staring hard at the front of the chicken coop.  Thankfully Jim was able to scare him off with some loud noises. ;)  (Those of you who know him well, will know what that means!)  We have the pen and coop protected with an electric fence, but bears have been a nuisance so far this summer.  We thought it was cool when the bear family passed through back on Mother's Day . . . but we've now had one or more around 4-5 times since then, which is quite unusual for us.  At least so far, no damage or loss of chickens has occurred!

I was mostly "unplugged" last week--I checked email about 3-4 times and checked out a couple of blogs, but otherwise I was offline.  It was good for me and I had time to get a lot of reading done too, in between visiting with everyone and shopping with my mother-in-law and sis-in-law! :)  This week I haven't been limiting my internet time as much, since I'm trying to catch up on all the posts that piled up in my reader over the past week, and I've been on Facebook a little bit.  But next week, it's back to the social media experiment! :)  Along with that, I was excited to download Sarah Mae's new ebook, The UnWired Mom.  If you subscribe to her blog, you can get it free through the end of today!  It is also available for Kindle.   I haven't had time to dive into it yet, but I love Sarah Mae's writing and I'm sure this book will be fantastic.

I'm hoping to get a couple more posts up this week, as I have some book reviews to do and at least one other post that I've started but not finished yet.  But for tomorrow, we're going to beat the heat and head to the lake! :)  Yay for beach days!  Hope you are all having a wonderful week!