Summer Rolls On

It's August! Since Catherine started soccer practice this week (Mary's starts next week) and the planners I got for the girls' school start with the first week in August, I decided this would be a good week to ease us back into a regular school-every-day schedule.

But since having their own planners is motivating the girls beyond anything I could have imagined, they are busting through our light school schedule in about an hour each morning, so we're pretty much free by second breakfast. That leaves plenty of time for summer fun still.

Unfortunately I've mostly been taking pictures of other people's kids lately, but (luckily?) I still have a few backlogged from July.

This is from way back before we left on vacation. We met Carrie and her kids for some clambering at Turtle Park, and Sophie happened to be outside when we were getting ready to go so she came along as well (because really, why go anywhere without a kid in every seat in the van?). Just take a moment to look at each individual kid in the picture. I love all of them.

Oh, Miss Mary. This girl still never stops singing. Flying down the sidewalk on her scooter... singing at the top of her voice.

If we have to go more than a few hours without some sort of physical outlet for Michael Jr, it could take twice as many hours of this type of thing for him to settle into a manageable balance again.

Uncle Tommy and Aunt Jena are in town, which means we got to watch some bike racing! The race not too far from us follows a circular path through a park, so we can sit in one spot and watch the racers go by about ten times during one race. A better setup could not have been engineered for Gussie. Every time a bike or pack of bikes came around the corner to go by us again, he would light up and shout, "Nother one bike coming! Nother one bike!"

Michael Jr also still gets really excited by a good bike race.

In fact I think he was so inspired this time that he asked if we could get out the pedal bike his size so he could learn to ride it. We've had one in the basement for a while but the one time I had it out he sat on it for a second and ran back to his balance bike. But yesterday he spent about ten minutes figuring out the pedaling while I kept him steady, and today after about two minutes of that he took off faster than I could run beside him! He rode his bike by himself the whole way to the park and back for soccer practice this evening, which game him a lot of practice with the starts and stops. So, no pictures, but another balance bike graduate, just like that.

And a totally random picture of Catherine with our first softneck garlic harvest a few weeks ago.