Over Labor Day weekend, we hit the park and Petroglyph…The kids love art and even Cameron has remarkable patience for the whole process! We have actually gone back to Petroglyph for more work–we have one more trip yet! I’m working on some bowls for the kids and have yet to finish Dylan’s (although he has already picked out the colors he wants)….
We got us another monkey! She likes swinging before heading down the slides!
Also, she calls slides and swings “wee”!
School started on 8/28 this year, the day before my birthday, so on the first weekend of the new school year, we (well, Tom) invited some close family friends over to celebrate my bday and to yap about the kids. I was taken a little by surprise, but it was a fun evening overall!
Heather made my birthday cake and the kids helped decorate! Dylan made a flower and carrot out of fondant; Taliana made a frog; K. made a flower and Heather made the ladybug!
The kids were very excited to show me their handiwork! I just think it is so sweet that Heather takes the time to do these art projects with them when she has them with her (Dylan is now at her house 2 days a week, after school).
I got a lot of help blowing out the candles!
Just ahead of the beginning of second grade, Dylan lost his first tooth…and he got a hair cut! He lost his tooth at summer camp, and as he tells it, he was unable to eat his lunch and the camp counselor didn’t want to yank it out, but when they went to the bathroom to check on it, out it popped!
Yes, he did manage to keep it safe and, later in the evening, he wrote a note to the tooth fairy telling her he wanted to “kepe” the tooth.
During these past few incredibly hot days of summer, we also ate out in the backyard a lot….
This one loves being outside. It is interesting to see which vocabulary words bubble to the top of her priorities list! “Outside”, “shoes”, and “let’s go” are among them!
She can arrange pinwheels for literally hours!
The kids still are making good use of the little house we got from Jason and Tyler. One of Cameron’s favorite games is called “friend’s house.” She makes “flour cake soup” with water and dirt and I go over and enjoy some when it’s “ready.”
Tom hates the sidewalk chalk, but the kids love it!
Dylan got a sidewalk chalk activity pack with 3-D glasses as a bday present from his good buddy Maya. Pretty groovy.
This Bilibo toy got rave reviews from … somewhere, so at some point, one of the kids got it as a gift from us. I couldn’t really see the big appeal, but I’m happy Chloe seems to actually like it!
Cameron apparently likes it, too! So, I guess it wasn’t a total waste of money and space.
I guess I have also used it to carry freshly-cut basil!
Now that summer is over, we are missing the longer days (already!) and the relative flexibility of summer mornings!
Just before school started, the La Fonda bridge opened back up and it was cause for local celebration! Last summer, it was knocked down during the wee hours of the morning with nothing more than a “giant machine invented in 1966 called a Ho-Ram” (and some pictures of our in-laws (Jeff’s nieces and their dad) made it in a local paper) and subsequently rebuilt, with bike lanes and a pedestrian sidewalk added to it. The widening was part of a larger effort to span additional lanes being added to the freeway below.
In any case, the bridge closure cut off a route to a significant number of elementary school families and, obviously, a way out of the neighborhood for all of us residents! So, the re-opening was a big deal. And, of course, we wanted to be one of the first few to walk/bike/skip across it!
I thought Dylan would be able to ride his bike across while I pushed Chloe merrily along in the stroller, but the event drew quite a crowd! We saw some neighbors, including Maddie (from Dylan’s kindergarten class) and a couple of the Kinder teachers(!).
So, there was no actual riding of the bike across the bridge. But we got to register Dylan’s bike with the police, do some spin art, get some goodie bags and apple juice, and get some sno-cones, so nobody was disappointed.
Now that the bridge is open again, the school traffic on our street has improved immensely! Also, we now have our more direct route to the beach (and other east-ward destinations) back!
Our whole family walked Dylan down to school this morning for his first day of second grade.
He’s in the same class with Maya–one of his best buddies–and in a classroom that is tucked a little bit further away from the chaos of the playground. He really wanted Ms. Fish (the teacher T. had for second grade), but overall, I think he’s probably in the class that will benefit him the most. He tends to be easily distracted, so being out in Ms. Fish’s portable out there by the playground, may well have been too distracting for him. Also, when I asked him his preference–would he want to be in Ms. Fish’s class or be in the same class with Maya–it was a total no-brainer: he would prefer to be with Maya. And, he’s in there with Sienna (Maya and Sienna were best buddies in Kindergarten).
He is such a great fella. He is all set to have a superb year with Mrs. Puretz. And, we are, too! I’m eager to see what he’ll learn this year and eager to see him continue to grow, intellectually, physically, and emotionally.
We did a second camping trip this summer, also in Marin County. This second trip was with 4 other families, organized by Jenny. China Camp was a lot hotter…and there were more bugs, less shade and less privacy, plus we had to hike our stuff up about 100 yards up a short but steep hill, but it was another fun trip!
The big kids got along very well, and it was nice to see Dylan slotting in so easily (the girls have known each other since birth and went to the same daycare for several years–so while us parents have known one another, Dylan has not spent much time with this group).
We did a hike on the first day and Jenny and I snuck in a 6 mile run on our final morning there. Good times, for sure.
Cameron loves climbing trees! And, I love that she loves this!
Finally, here are some photos from our camping trip with HAKT (see previous post)!
Dinner was foil-wrapped yummies (tofu, various veggies) and corn on the cob. Yum!
For the first night, we threw the foil-wrapped meals directly on the charcoal. Tom and I agreed this was a pretty cool way to cook dinner. I think we forgot that we were going to try this at home!
Junior Ex “trained” Dylan well. He was such a good hiker this year!
Cameron’s birthday circle at school was on the Tuesday after her birthday (she was at Lola’s house on her actual bday ).
She transitions into teacher Lauren’s group starting tomorrow!!! We love teacher Erika, who led her bday circle this year…
The bday child gets to pick a story and a song. Cameron picked “ABC’s” and Pinkalicious (which, if you haven’t read it before, is totally hilarious!)
Cameron was pretty shy at birthday circle…she doesn’t seem to be entirely comfy in front of crowds! But, I think she really felt special.
Oh, my goodness! The birthday banner mermaid had pink hair…I didn’t communicate this to the gals at the school, but perhaps Tom did!
So one more bday circle before Kindergartent!!
And, finally, some pictures from Cameron’s 4th bday celebration. This year, the kids had so much fun at Ellie’s Pump It Up bday party that Cameron wanted to have it at a bounce house (Pump’d in Watsonville), but then I thought it might be nice to do it at a more local place that had more options (obstacle course, plus all of the other gymnastics equipment–foam pit, rings, tumble trak, etc.), so we opted for a party at Santa Cruz Gymnastics.
The advantage to this place is that you can have as many kiddie guests you want; the con is that you only get 30 minutes in the party room–that made for a quickie food/cake portion of the party!
I’m happy to say that our little middle child enjoyed her birthday immensely. Some buddies from school came to celebrate with us which I think really made her day (special guest, for sure, was Jada). Here are some photo highlights….
(Again, these are in terrible order…I think mostly in reverse-chronological order, but I’m eschewing proper timeline to save a tiny bit of time in writing this post!)
And, a note about the cake and theme: it was all about mermaids! Cameron wanted a mermaid with pink hair. Black China Bakery complied!
I see Simone in the corner there giving Cameron an “assist!”
Here’s the cake…
These two are exactly 7 days apart.
After listening to the rules, the kids were OFF!
Do people still say “cowabunga?”
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It is hard to believe that Cameron will start Kindergarten next year!!! She is getting so big!
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!
