Ivy Sommer Dutton’s Super Summer Break

Another summer break is almost over with school starting August 24th. But it hasn’t been a boring summer for Ivy! We kicked off the summer immediately with 2 weeks of Swim Classes at Houston Swim Club – Sharpstown location. Then tt was another round of Vacation Bible Schools, and as usual Houston had plenty to choose from. This year, however, Ivy went to 1 VBS that lasted for 6 whole weeks. It turned out to be GREAT! It was at a small church within walking distance to our house, and they had plenty of things to do all day long. They challenged the kids to memorize all of the books of the bible and if they did they’d get a special treat – a field trip to an Oil Ranch. Much to my amazement Ivy did it! She got to spend the day – which was actually on her birthday (July 23rd) – at this Texas Oil Ranch.

Ivy also really enjoyed going to Second Baptist Church and they mega-VBS with lights and smoke and super heroes.

Not all of the summer camps were Christian-oriented. She also did a week of science camp at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and studied Kitchen Chemistry. I enjoyed going there each day to drop off and pick her up. I’d often hang around and check out some of the exhibits.

There were lots of activities and fun, but the best part wasmaking some new friends. Across the street we met Romeo (age 6) and his niece Breseis (age 7) and her brother Adrian (age 4). We also invited Julie (age 10) from next door to come over and play too. We had lots of fun on several different days including a 2 trips to the Natural Science Museum, and 1 trip to the Children’s Museum, a quick visit to the observation floor at Chase Tower, and an ‘End of Summer’ party at our house. In the meantime, we also just spend some time at home playing video games and building stuff with the magnetic tiles.

Not everything in summer was great – there was a broken arm in the middle of all that fun. But she seemed to deal with it just fine and got lots of people to sign her cast. It was finally removed and life was back to normal. You can read the details on this blog post.

As for her birthday… well, Ivy had a full-blown birthday ‘bender’. The celebration lasted for 3 days! First, on her actual birth day (July 23rd), she went with Impact Church to the Texas Oil Ranch for goat-petting and barn-swinging and other fun stuff. The next day she went to Melly Tovar’s house for the day and had a party there with cake and a pinata! Then on Saturday we had her official birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese which turned out to be fun for everyone including the grown-ups. All of the grown-ups noticed that Chuck-E-Cheese has improved their food. It used to be kind of ‘meh’, but now it is actually pretty good pizza and sandwiches!

Ivy got this cool bicycyle for birthday. 🙂