A Return To July

At this, the beginning of Autumn, I feel a touch of melancholy at the loss of the nice, warm days, and the decreased flexibility in work and school schedules. To dissipate this melancholy, I thought it would be a fun idea to look back into the archives of my photographs and pull out a few images from this past Summer.

Therefore, in this retro-image post, I will focus on our trips to the Saginaw County Fair and also a picnic at Bay City State Park. Both adventures occurred in late July of 2007.

In the first image, we are visiting one of the animal exhibits at the Saginaw County Fair. Theodore and Julia are both utilizing some of their paternal genome in studying the lifestyle and behavior of the pigs at the fair:





The pigs were rather large and too sleepy and cumbersome to hold, and so Theo soon lost interest. However, little Theo found great excitement in observing an animal similar in size and age to him.... a baby chick! Here, we see him gently petting this downy feathered friend:





A few days after our visit to the Fair, all of us in the family decided it would be fun and exciting to make a picnic supper and take it to a park. We wanted to be comfortably messy and have plenty of room to play. The park we chose was Bay City State Park, and we planned our excursion for a late Monday afternoon. The weather was beautiful, with temperatures in the mid 80s. Choosing dinnertime on a Monday proved a wonderful decision as only a relatively small number of other people were using the park, and we had plenty of options on locations to eat, where to explore, and what to do.

Theo's mom prepared a wonderful feast consisting of a cold chicken & salsa salad. We ate the salad mixture on tortillas and also had fresh vegetables and various other snacks. The meal was a true gourmet delight! Theo loved the meal, and simply referred to everything as "tacos" or "cheese", but his aiming ability (success in getting food to his mouth) was as usual only around 0.500. For Theo's Mom and myself, it was pleasant being able to allow the numerous crumbs to simply fall to the ground.

Here we see our little guy sitting at the picnic table after having worked on eating his desert, chocolate pudding:



Eating energized little Theo and here we see him on the swing set at the park. Even though he is a little nervous about the swinging motion itself, he was very adamant about trying the activity (especially since his sister, Julia, is so very fond of swings):





After expending some energy following dinner, Theo and the rest of the family decided to take a long, gentle walk along the paths leading up to the beach at Bay City State Park. At the beach,we removed our shoes to be able to feel the warm sand between our toes.

Theo, having never walked on the beach before, was a little unsteady due to the sand shifting under his feet. However, after a few minutes he found his bearing and started racing up and down the beach:





These two wonderful adventures help me to recall some of the fun of this past Summer.

Theo's Dad