As I’m beginning to write this post, I have my date countdown timer noting that Dylan’s first day as a second grader will commence in 29 hours! It gets old, I’m sure, to constantly hear the refrain that time goes by so fast, but it seems especially true of this summer!
I had what I thought was a very short list of summer activities–little excursions and such–and we only did, literally, a handful of them (BJWRR, Legoland, Sea World, berry picking, backyard campout)!! We didn’t even make it to see the Boardwalk shows (although we did make it to the Boardwalk a few times!).
Chloe is really beginning very earnest efforts to form actual sentences. It’s hard to keep track of it all, but as an example, she is now able to approximate the sounds of “pumpkin pie” (one of her nicknames) as well as “up above” in twinkle twinkle (she definitely has the melody down). She has added, “outside, “other side” to her spoken words and now she signs “shoes” and “hot” (she signs the words as she speaks them). She is extraordinarily cute!
Also, she has a great laugh…and if she hears you laughing, she’ll start cracking up even more! And, she’s quite an adventurer! Today, at Dylan’s soccer practice, she decided it would be fun to go down the slide on her belly-feet-first!
It’s been a great summer. In some sense, I feel like we’ve found our stride as a family of 5. I’ve somehow managed to squeeze in a couple of side-projects (karenhutton.com/home, launching soon) as well as a volunteer gig helping out with server-side tasks for a group of folks trying to get a local children’s museum up and running.
Tom is finding the time to work out regularly and has gotten new running PR’s (personal records) as have I (lately, I’ve been doing 30-minute runs during the kids swim class) and we’ve managed to get the kids fed, bathed and in bed within 15 minutes of target bedtime on the heels of twice weekly, evening swim classes that end at 6:30pm. These seem like really trivial things, but finding time for “extras” (the exercising and, for me, the technical side projects) has been extraordinarily challenging in previous years. The backyard is getting nicer and we’re also finally beginning to take some baby steps in prepping the Tan Room for Dylan’s use.
I will miss this summer!
