Summer ended three months ago, and we finally have the pictures to show for it.

The kids spent most of the summer in a variety of different week-long camps run by the local YMCA: Lego Robotics, Delicious Science and Cooking, Swimming, etc. However, the big one, for Julia at least, was Camp Campbell: an actual overnight camp. Camp Campbell is where Joe and I camped with the Adventure Guides last spring, so we’d been looking for an opportunity to give Julia a chance to try it as well (though Julia ended up sleeping in much nicer accommodations than Joe and I had). The Y offers a shortened, three-day session for younger kids, and we timed it so that Julia could go at the same time as Phoebe and Zoe Dueltgen, two of her oldest friends. Somehow, Julia, her cabin-mates, the counsellors and the campground all emerged more or less unscathed, and Julia is looking forward to going back for a full week next year.

Toward the end of July—more or less the end of summer as well, because of the way the school year is set up—we traveled to Chicago to visit family and experience humidity. We succeeded in accomplishing the former goal, but utterly failed in the latter: the Chicago area (as well as much of the midwest) spent the year in the throes of a punishing drought. It was drier there—and the grass deader—than I ever remember it being.

The heat didn’t deter the kids, of course. My Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack graciously invited us over to their place to celebrate my cousin Caitlin’s 18^th birthday and to swim in their pool. Julia was happy to show off the progress she’d made at swim camp over the summer, but Joe was still not 100% comfortable in the water, as the photos show.

We also made a trip to Donley’s Wild West Town, out in Union, Illinois. Donley’s has been around since 1974, but somehow it escaped our attention until this year; thus, it was new to all of us. It’s a quaint little amusement park with a few low-key rides, games and activities, pony rides and an action-packed Wild West Show that runs thrice daily.

Julia and Joe had a great time at the park, though Julia had a bit of a run-in with a fractious pair of ponies. She was the first person to line up for a pony ride in the morning, and the first pony she rode on got a little antsy toward the end of the ride. And by “antsy” I mean that the pony actively tried to throw her. To her credit, Julia was calm and collected (or merely paralyzed with fear) throughout. She even hung around to give it another shot on a different pony after Joe took his turn, but that pony also decided that it wasn’t particularly interested in carrying her—so maybe it was Julia after all. In any event, it appears that we don’t have to worry about shelling out for lessons in equestrianism any time soon.

Joe’s favorite activity at Donley’s, by far, was the canoe ride, in which riders float slowly around a circuit filled with suspiciously blue water, propelled by a current generated by unseen forces. Given a chance, Joe would likely have ridden the canoes all day long: it’s an open question as to whether he would have succumbed to sunstroke before poisoning himself by dragging his hands in the unnaturally azure waters and sucking his thumb.

Naturally, we visited my grandparents while we were in town. We were lucky to be there at the same time as my cousin Leslie, whom I hadn’t seen in many years—a bit ironically, as she lives closer to us than any of my other relatives, in Orangevale, California. In looking at the pictures from this part of the trip, you may notice that one appears to have been very heavily processed. This wasn’t an effort on my part to show off my artistic sensibilities; rather, it was the one shot that caught everyone with somewhat reasonable facial expressions, and it came out of the camera very underexposed. I did my best to salvage it with my limited skills.

There is one other photo for which I took a pretty aggressive approach to editing, but I’ll leave that one for you to identify.

On the subject of photographing uncooperative subjects, the last sequence of pictures in the set was taken by my mother on the deck in our backyard in a somewhat futile effort to get a standard, nice portrait of both kids together. I’m not sure any of them really qualify by that measure, but taken as a whole, I felt they captured the essence of the kids’ personalities and their relationship, at least on that particular day.