Summer Recap

 Note: As I was logging in to put a First Day of School post up, I noticed that the last two posts I thought I'd put up in the past couple weeks didn't post. Also, one of them was only have finished now. So I'm adding some more photos on to this one and the one about siblings will just get finished when it gets finished. Again.

Summer is nearly over. Well, summer break is nearly over. I'm beginning to believe that the hot weather will be here forever, though. Gabe starts school on the 15th. Only a week away. It is staggeringly difficult to believe, actually. I mean, on the one hand, it's something I've been looking forward to for awhile now. But on the other, how can he possibly be five years old already?

But before we start on the school stuff, I figured I better go through and do a bit up an update on pictures and videos that I've been remiss in putting up on the blog for the past few months.

I know, I know. I'm a terrible person. There are like 30 pictures here covering almost the entire summer.  I have to admit, updating the blog has been a low priority lately. It's not that I don't want to, and it's not that the kids aren't providing me with ample source material--they are--it's mostly a complete lack of motivation to do pretty much everything. It's not been an easy summer and I'm very hopeful that school is the answer to the problem (the problem being that my children are raving, whining, screaming, teasing, not-listening, infuriating lunatics right now). 

Norah as leopard. Going down a slide, as leopards often do.

Yes, that's a snake. They found it in one of the plants in the yard (before all of our plants died thanks to the liberals discovering global warming).

Norah doesn't like to touch her food. She complains about little smudges of dirt on her hands or feet when she's in the house. And then she goes outside and plays with snakes and covers herself head to toe in mud. Though, now that I put that in writing, I realize that it pretty accurately describes Libby, too.

Birthday mugs. Libby took the kids over to our friend Hannah's studio and she helped the kids glaze these (Libby threw them) with colors of their choosing. They are precious to me. Sadly, they are also not terribly useful as they only hold a big shot's worth of liquid. One pound shot glasses, more or less. But they are pretty!

Norah dressed up like a bunny leopard? I don't know what's going on in this picture--it was on a Saturday while I was at the shop and Libby had the kids out "doing things."

Libby took Norah out for a Mommy-daughter date night right after Brave came out (see, it's been a long time since I've sorted through my pictures). It was the first movie Norah went to on her own, and she did great. She also ate most of a large popcorn on her own. And we wonder why she has a bit of a girth problem.

Wearing one of my ball caps. Gangsta.

We had a run, around early July, of her sleeping in weird places upstairs. There was a string of like five out of ten nights that she fell asleep somewhere other than her bed. Considering how much she flails about at night, I honestly don't know how she never rolled down the stairs.

Top of the stairs, between the bedrooms.

On the floor, next to the bed in the spare bedroom.  And then, unexpectedly, it just stopped and she hasn't done it for over a month now. Kids are weird.

Speaking of weird. Fairy wings, feather boa, green grabber thing and a sword.

Norah in farm equipment. Possibly at the county fair? Mostly I'm just posting this because she's wearing a sky blue Albers Brothers Gelbvieh shirt that was originally purchased for Ben to wear when he was four or five. It's a pretty awesome shirt, really.

Army helmet, feather boa, swimsuit, mud boots, sawed off nerf shotgun. The kid knows how to accessorize.

Perhaps this has something to do with why I'm getting eighth grade level attitude out of her.

I tried to teach them to play that dueling banjos song from Deliverance, but it was beyond the capacity for the Yo Gabba Gabba guitar. Also, nobody squealed like a pig. Thank god.

This is a picture from the night we went to see Gabe's kindergarten--the rest of which I'll cover in a separate post--but it was a cute picture so I thought I should put it on here.

Probably this should be a Norman Rockwell picture. Except maybe Norah should be wearing a shirt and Gabe should have on something over his underwear.

Graduation robe, gun holster, bead necklace (in his right hand) and sword. He has lots of other stuff, too. He was shoving stuff in the sleeves and using them like pockets.

I'm not even sure what to put as a caption for this one.

Or this one, actually. We are nothing if not classy, though.

This was the veil Libby's mom wore when she got married. If that tells you anything about the size of Norah's head . . . .

As we were waiting for lunch the other day, the kids decided they wanted to work on their poses. So here they are.

At least the holster wasn't hanging underneath the sword . . . .

 

 

 

And, finally, a video of them playing in the mud, classing up our barren yard. Seriously. We won't have grass left in most of it after this year--and we barely had any left after last year. After letting the sprinkler dribble for almost an hour for the kids to tromp around in, we only created a puddle about ten feet wide. It never spread. The water just kept soaking in. Pretty awful.