Beach day

During the first week of August, my friend Andrea texted my friend Melanie and me on our little group text that we always have going. She was driving home from Idaho with her family and wanted to know if we could all meet up at the beach that weekend! (First of all--can I tell you how much I love these girls? Andrea is the kind of person who is SO on top of it all that she could conceive this idea at the end of a 20-hr drive after a month away from home and actually make it happen, and Melanie is the kind of girl who says, oh sure, a 7-hr drive to see you for a few hours? Absolutely!)

It had been 2 years since all of us were together at Thanksgiving, and an entire year since I've seen Andrea (we visited Melanie's family just a few months ago on our way to Utah and also got to see them in March), and I was SOOOO excited for all of us to be together again!! These two ladies are some of my very very dearest friends ever and I am so glad that we have kept this friendship going long after we no longer live within walking distance of each other!

Anyway--we had the most perfect day together that Saturday. Andrea's family and mine met up at my parents' house (they were in Utah at the time but generously let us stay there!) and we talked waaay too late into the night after getting all the kids to bed. The next morning we met up with Melanie's family at the beach. 

Love these cute girls! Some of Juliet's very best friends in the world. :-)



And I will let the pictures speak for themselves. 

I could have used another week of talking with these girls. We're already working on planning that. :-)

It was absolute heaven--we had beautiful weather, the kids were SO thrilled to see each other, the waves were perfect--the adults took turns trading off between wave-jumping with kids and hanging out on the beach with kids. Just absolutely blissful and idyllic. 

I loved seeing Neil get a chance to chat with his buddies again--he and Tyler worked together for years and always have lots of catching up to do. :-) 

Andrea's family left a little earlier--all of those great photos previously in the post were hers. :-)  We snapped a few quick ones of the kids as Melanie's family was packing up. 

Windblown and in love. :-)  And very pregnant. 

One last one with Melanie! 

And our boys--Luke was SO tired by this point, haha!

Other July photos from Facebook I forgot about

 

More unabashed Facebook-photo-reposting--I really do need to email myself some pictures from my iPad.

A few weeks ago we drove up to Lake Michigan for the day to spend some time with my family--Mary Beth came over from Chicago and we got to spend a day with Rosalind and Chris before they left for Hong Kong--for a year! It was so fun to see them one last time and spend the day on the beach huddled in towels and sweatshirts eating too many Oreos. As we do. :-) Apparently it was too cold to take photos because I think this is one my mom texted me? I didn't take any photos. You would think I would remember to do that, but...huddled in towels.

Speaking of my mom texting me photos, these are also from her--the weekend before that we met up in Chicago and stayed at Mary Beth's for a night. It was so fun to get a quick dose of really concentrated Mary Beth & Mom time--we spent the day Saturday at the botanical gardens and they were absolutely beautiful!!! 







For a few days my kids were REALLY into painting watercolor dragons. I have about 8000 watercolors of dragons in stacks around my house, because we are not allowed to throw any of them away because they are all unique and different. 

And the top of my 'fridge is home to several Play-Doh dragons which have been drying up there for weeks--I think they are destined to be painted with watercolors.

 Everyone is really into reading on the trampoline. I'm not exactly sure what the allure is--maybe just the feeling of sun baking into your skin while you immerse yourself in a good book?

There was one week where we made jam three times. THREE TIMES. I think it ended up between something like 23 different batches, which is probably why I stopped reading instructions and ended up with cherry syrup. 

I need to do peaches in the next couple of weeks, which are absolutely my least favorite thing ever to can. (Applesauce is my favorite.) But we looooove canned peaches, especially atop our waffles in January. Tastes like summer sunshine and every year I dread the peach-canning days and every winter I'm so glad I stuck it out again.

Nathan eats at least 2 popsicles every afternoon--it's his little ritual. He knows that as soon as the treadmill turns off that it's popsicle time. I really could care less about popsicles but the kids have inherited Neil's obsession with them and so we usually go through 4-5 boxes a week. I'm actually quite proud of the fact that we have a freezer full of really cool popsicles. It's something very easy to do that makes my kids think I'm an awesome mom. If only the rest of it were that simple, right?

Also--Nathan is super particular about dressing himself these days and likes to wear everything backwards. Everything. He also only likes "soft shorts" and prefers his underwear inside out as well as backwards. I'm actually really surprised that his shirt is on correctly in this photo--today I saw him take his rashguard swim top and his trunks off so he could turn the trunks around backwards and turn the top inside out and backwards before putting it back on. Funny guy. At least he gets dressed every morning which means he's one up on all his siblings...and me. (Basically this summer I am living in two skirts, running shorts, my swimsuit, and my favorite pair of stretchy pajama pants.)

A random Sunday dinner that I photographed. Nothing particularly special about it, but I just wanted a quick snap of all those darling people that I love so much! 

Catching up on July

We're starting to wind down the summer--CRAZY! All the school supplies are purchased and packed in everyone's backpacks (man oh man that was crazy but it feels so good to have it done!) and we have orientations starting next week. I am torn between being excited to have more of a routine/schedule/quiet and feeling like, are you kidding me? Where did it go?! Did we do everything we should have done?

This has been such a low-key summer (after our big road trip!). I think that's a combination of things--being pregnant and pretty darn tired + feeling like the kids had a pretty grueling school year and just wanting to take it easy in the summer and really relax. We have spent most of our time either in pajamas playing Legos, in pajamas reading giant piles of books, or in swimsuits going crazy in the pool. (And I mean that literally. Every day I come home and think, "Hurray! Another day where Nathan did not drown!" Little guy thinks he can swim and he can't, but he HATES having people hold him so he does his best to sneakily edge away/push your hands away/silently slip into the water when someone else is asking me a question. Basically all my kids have the time of their lives every afternoon and I am ratcheting up my adrenaline levels thanks to Nate the slippery fish.)

Anyway, we went from having two pretty decent swimmers (Jules and Abigail) to both Isaac and Luke being very confident swimmers and the girls spending 90% of their time seeing how long & far they can swim along the bottom of the pool (I still keep an eye on Luke every second, but he can swim across the pool by himself). The girls and Isaac have learned to dive--so has Nathan, bizarrely enough. Luke is probably going to be our best swimmer--he is super fast and can hold his breath for a ridiculously long time! They have all made a TON of progress this year and it makes me really excited for our Florida trip in a few weeks!

Everyone has done really well on their summer reading lists. Abigail finished hers a few weeks ago and loved every single one. Jules is almost done and has discovered so many new favorites! Isaac is pretty close to finishing up as well, but we've swapped out a couple of his when he found that he really really wanted to continue with the next book in the series, etc. I think it's been a success. Always interesting when we go to the library and they check out a bunch of crappy books that they've read a million times (I have strong feelings about authors who churn out repetitive books with the same plot just to make $$...but I guess I'm guilty of also loving my Agatha Christie and Louis L'Amour books, which are basically the same thing), but in a day or two they burn through all the library books, reemerge from the reading cocoon of total ignorance of their surroundings, and are back to the good stuff. And then they get sufficiently sucked into the good stuff that I find them reading next to the front door sidelight at 6 AM. :-) 

Isaac turned seven--almost three weeks ago! I have lots more pictures on my iPad but this is the one I can easily download. (Yes, every photo in this post is a recycled Facebook photo.) He had a great birthday--all the remote control and build-it-yourself-robots one little boy could possibly need. :-) I'm promising myself that I will download those photos in the next week--summer term ends on Friday and grades are due Monday and then I will have a wee bit more free time!

And I'm completely embarrassed that apparently I posted more photos of my own birthday than my son's. Neil and I ran a trail 5k for my birthday that was super fun (so nice that the dates coincided!) and then he indulged me and ran another 5k with me when we finished because I was stressed about only running 3.1 miles instead of my normal mileage. Hah! It was a blast--super fun course with lots of logs to hurdle, streams to cross, and beautiful woods. Could have done without the ankle-deep sand and endless concrete steps but hey, nothing is perfect. :-) It was really nice to see a lot of my running friends in the community that I haven't seen lately, since I've been running mostly on the treadmill instead of the group runs--hopefully once it cools off I can get outside again! It was such a great day and it was so, so, so wonderful to have so much time with Neil. He's been doing a lot of 18 & 20-hr days and "it's been hard" is an understatement. Quite aside from the constantly-being-on thing as a parent, I just really miss that awesome man I married. 

31 weeks last week and the miles are still feeling surprisingly good. This week (32 weeks) so far was 8 Monday, 6 Tuesday, and another 6 with speedwork today. Still trying to average 30 mpw as long as I can. :-) Why do I feel so much better being pregnant at 33 (birthday!) than I did at 29 with Nate? Must be those years off to actually let my body recover!

A little less sweaty here at 30 weeks. :-)

Abigail and Juliet were SUPER excited to make me a treat for my birthday. They decided to make puff-pastry tarts with chocolate, cream, and strawberries. The tarts were delicious but the poor girls were NOT happy with the outcome (the recipe wasn't very well-written and I think we should have blind-baked the pastry before adding the filling, which is what I normally would have done, but we were going to follow that recipe to the letter!).

We've been watching the British Baking Show on Netflix lately on Sunday evenings and they felt like that recipe was akin to a technical challenge. :-) And when I told them that I loved the tarts and they were super tasty (they were! I ate a ridiculous number of them!) they just looked at me woefully and said, "Paul Hollywood would say the pastry was underbaked. And he would be RIGHT."

After-church nail painting. This makes me so sad. Isaac LOVES having his nails painted and always has a super-specific design in mind, but if we go anywhere in public he has me remove the polish because he doesn't want to get teased by other kids. My heart breaks a little bit every time and I don't know what the best thing to do is--we've talked a lot about it and suggested different strategies but he just feels more comfortable without the polish in public even though he adores the bright colors and is SO creative in coming up with his chosen designs and color coordination. It's really hard for me to watch him go through this. 

On a lighter note, we are super-obsessed with making Greek yogurt right now. One batch lasts us one day because that's all anyone wants to eat until it's gone! Soooo yummy, especially when stirred up with a tablespoon of cherry syrup (first jam I've ever made that failed to jell, entirely due to the fact that I had made jam so many times that week that I didn't bother to read the directions again, started talking to one of the kids, and put everything in in the wrong order. Oh well. The syrup is dang good.)