Summer Swimmin'

Our summer has featured lots of swimming for our girls - at Long Lake, Rockford Middle School (swimming lessons), the Groenenbooms, Aunt Lizzy's apartment, Aunt Jen's apartment, a teaching colleague's house, and my Uncle Andy's house (I think that's all of them). Annika has turned into quite the little trout, and can almost swim without any flotation device. When she is wearing one, though, she doesn't have any inhibitions - she and I were trading cannonballs off the diving board at Uncle Andy's house the other night. Her diving board (jumping board?) repertoire also includes "the pencil", a full twist, and the "pencil with a twist" combination (degree of difficulty 2.1). Meanwhile, Kainan, age 7, was easily outdoing both of us with dives, flips and twists in every direction.

Following Katelyn's shower at Uncle Andy's a few weeks back, Jake even got into the action, floating (literally) quite happily in the hot tub (at a warm, but not hot, temperature).

Also, our house continues to ride the real estate market. While we had nearly two months of no action at all, in the last few weeks we've had a number of people look at it , we had an open house, and one semi-interested party has asked some questions. We haven't seen any offers yet, though, and the start of school is on the horizon. We'll see...

Stuff I Forgot

Other things that I missed in the last post:

Abby had a birthday! She's three now, and acts like it on occasion. We made it through the event and managed to keep Annika from taking charge of Abby's newly opened gifts.

We have long hoses at our house, one connected in the garage and the other in the back. They can come together in the yard, and the girls had a good old time a few weeks ago playing with them. They sprayed each other plenty, but Annika really enjoyed blasting her own head. I also played "avoid the water", and tried to take the nozzles away from them, but they can turn the nozzles too fast for you to "fake them out" and even get close. Below, Annika tries to get me, but with a poorly chosen nozzle setting. Abby's would do a better job. Overall, we all got soaked.

Also, the other day Annika got three nasty bug bites and then had a spectacular allergic reaction to them and broke out in hives. She's since recovered, but not until she took some prescribed steroids that reduced the hives but made her cah-wazy! In the evening she was on an incredible emotional roller coaster, where she was spastically excited and oblivious to others and common sense, but also despondent and weeping beyond consolation over the stupidest little stuff. Thankfully, it's over now.

Finally:

Insert funny caption here.

Summer Happenings

Here's to being in the education profession:

Even though I'm currently teaching a class, it's fully online, so I don't have to go to Big Rapids all that often. That gives us the time to go pick raspberries, visit the zoo, get ice cream and play at the park. Having an infant throws a wrench into a lot of things, but we're fortunate to have a lot of freedom even so.

On the 4th of July we took the girls to see Ratatouille, which is deserving of all the good reviews that it's received. The big screen and big sound are still intimidating to the girls, but they mostly enjoyed themselves (although Abby will tell you she didn't like it). Crazily enough, though, we went in the afternoon and used a coupon to get popcorn and pop, and it still cost $30.50 for the four of us.

Later that night I took Annika to see the Sand Lake fireworks, near our house. We sat at an overpass of US 131, which put us about a kilometer away (based on a 3 second delay between seeing the firework and hearing the boom, and knowing that the speed of sound is more than 300 meters per second (thank you, physics degree)). It was just me and her, and we had a nice time, although it's hard to pass the time by playing "I spy" when it's dark out.

Other stuff:

Recently Jake has slept his longest nights yet, including a 9 and a half hour spell one night from 10pm to 7:30am between feedings. We had to pop a pacifier in twice, I think, but he never left his bed, and we weren't out for more than a few minutes. We couldn't be more pleased.

The other day Lisa had the perm taken out of her hair, so she' s curl-less for the first time since she was 8 years old. I think it looks a-good.

Annika tried to read the word "detective" on the cover of a book the other day, and it came out "deciphering." Of course, that's nowhere phonetically close, but I was impressed that she remembered hearing "deciphering" somewhere.

Finally, while Annika was at the counter on a barstool the other day, I poured her some Ice Blue Raspberry flavor Kool-Aid. She took a sip, and said "Creamy blue, sweet as a thousand seas." I busted out laughing.