Summer to-do's: half done!

The state of our summer to-do list, from June 7:

-Go to the zoo We've actually gone to two zoos, Madison and St. Louis!

-Go to the beach: Still trying to plan this. We're hoping to do a beach day with Jocelyn before she leaves for college, but she's a busy girl.

-Take a Betty Lou cruise: Ahhh, these cruises are a bit pricey and take some extra planning because we need to have the money and foresight to buy tickets ahead of time.

-Spend a night in Chicago: We really want to visit my brother and his girlfriend who recently moved to Chicago. We also want to put our Madison Children's Museum membership to good use, as we can get discounts to a lot of the museums there. I don't know when or if we can coordinate it though. Maybe in the fall?

-Go to Discovery World and other fun places in Milwaukee: Like Chicago, I don't know if we'll have the budget for this. The good thing about Milwaukee though is that we aren't limited to only going there in the summer!

-Go to a Brewers game: This still hasn't happened yet, but we're determined to get there. By this time last year we weren't even interested anymore as it wasn't a good year for our team. This year, they're hanging in though!

-Ride the merry-go-round at Ella's deli This was a lot of fun and we want to make this a regular outing, perhaps as a special birthday treat. We're seriously thinking of having a birthday party there as well.

-Go to a Mallards game: We tried to go a couple weeks ago, but because of poor planning it didn't work out. We didn't buy tickets ahead of time and the Mallards are wildly popular, especially on a Saturday night! Lesson learned, we're hoping to try again next weekend.

-Play at the Children's Museum: Mama took Allie when we had a day off in June but we'd like to get back there soon!

-See Grandma and Grandpa Durso, Aunt Julie and cousins Carson and Cole! We're hoping this will be during our week of vacation near the end of the month. We had such a fun time on our family vacation! I wish we could go back!

-Get ice cream at the Memorial Union terrace: We made it to the terrace this past weekend! It's always fun to go to the terrace, but its never fun to try and find parking there.

-Check out the Mad-City Ski Team: Now that my band concerts are over for the summer, we're free on Sunday nights for the shows, so we hope to do this in the next few weeks.

-Go swimming! We're going swimming as much as we can and we love it.

-Spend a lot of time with our whole family, especially Aunt Jocelyn who is going away to college in the fall. We've had lots of family time but would still like to get more before Jocelyn leaves!

So we've crossed off half the things on our list. Summer's a little more than half over, so it works out. I know we can at least get a few more of these things crossed off. This has been a fun project and a good way to finally take advantage of all the awesome things we can do here in Madison.