A Summer List

1.  Thank you all so much for your feedback about Bean.  Chris and I talked to him about his behavior, and he said he was missing his friends from school.  Even though he has only been out of school for three days now, I think he is looking ahead to a long summer without them and with Gracie instead.  I scheduled a few play dates for him, and Chris and I have talked about spending time with Bean one-on-one to give him a break from Gracie, too.  We explained that even though he was missing his friends, he still had to speak kindly to our family.  He’s a pretty good guy, so that little conversation has already improved his behavior.  I think having some time at Nana’s was helpful, too.  We’ll continue to pay attention to him this summer.  This has been a good reminder for Chris and I that we are getting to the point where the kids ages will become more pronounced, and that will mean that we can’t always lump them together when we do things.

2.  My camera broke.  Well, not so much as broke as died.  She was old, so it hasn’t been that surprising, but it certainly has been inconvenient.  I am going to take her to a Canon camera specialty shop today and see if they can maybe perform CPR on her.  Fingers crossed because cameras are expensive!!!!  Until then, be prepared for an onslaught of iPhone pictures on the bloggity blog.

3.  Yesterday was my first actual, real day of summer vacation.  I finished my training up on Tuesday, and immediately deemed Wednesday a beach day.  No matter the weather, I was going to be on the beach!  My mom brought the kids back home from her house where they had been enjoying Camp Nana for a few days, and we loaded everyone up in her van and headed to the beach.  It was a perfect day!  The sun was shining, the water was warm, and the kids were just as excited to be there as I was (which is not always the case with the beach and my kids…).

P.S. These are the only pictures I could get of Bean yesterday because unless he was eating, he was out in the water ALL DAY LONG! That boy is a fish!

4.  I just finished a really different book that continues to stay on my mind.  “With” by Skye Jethani is about changing your perspective of how you relate to God.  It is not an easy book to read.  Jethani writes as a theologian, not merely as a Christian, and so some of the writing is dense and kind of reads like those religion textbooks I had to read in college (fun fact: my degree is in English, but I minored in classics and religion).  The book really made me question my own faith and my relationship with God.  The premise is that we should live our life WITH God, instead of a life FOR him.  He has several other types of lives people live, but those are the ones that conflicted the most for me.  I can’t really explain more than that because the book is very personal, depending on how you relate to God.  But I definitely recommend this book to people who want to deepen their faith.

5.   Our family isn’t taking an official vacation this summer, and I’m sort of resigning myself to the fact that summer vacations will be hard for us for the next few years at least.  While summer is my least demanding time of year, it is definitely Chris’s most demanding.  His theater takes a break from their regular season, and so they use this time to do renovations and major updates around their campus.  And since Chris oversees the facilities operations, he has to be there for all those projects.  Summer is also the time when they set their budget for the upcoming season, and since he is also the business manager, he’s the one writing the budget, which takes weeks and is very stressful for him.  Not to mention, summer is when they have all of their summer camp programs, which bring in a major part of their funding for the rest of the season, and since Chris is also the general manager, he is around for this part, too.  By the time his crazy summer settles down in August, I am heading back to school.  We’re thinking about an October family vacation instead, but we’re both still kind of bummed about the summer vacation.

6.  I’m reading “Eleanor and Park” now.  It has been hyped by so many people (especially my students), but I’m finding it kind of… slow.  I’m halfway through it and am underwhelmed.  Does it get better????