A busy few weeks have passed us by. Summer began in earnest around here, with heat indexes above 100 to prove it, so we have been running around doing all sorts of fun activities....
Swim lessons have continued and now J is able to maintain himself horizontally in the water and dog paddle a good 10-12 feet before needing to come up for air. I suspended Baby E's lessons after it became apparent that J was going to need all my concentration and Baby E was happy to be in the water with me while I helped J but totally against staying on the side without throwing himself into the drink and two little boys crashing into the pool at the same time is simply too much for me to handle, not surprisingly. So E will be a little less of a water baby this summer. In the meantime, we went to a pool this week that had a slide, and J discovered a new activity he adores, sliding into the pool and swimming to Mommy, over and over and over again!
We've been attending some of the events for our local libraries' summer reading program and reading along dutifully to earn our summer prizes. Baby E gets read to for about half as much time as J, for multiple reasons including E's penchant for going to sleep without much coaxing, the relative length of his books, and his much shorter attention span, which means he earns prizes much more slowly than J. But we have until the end of July to read to both of them for 30 hours each, so I think we will make it, but only just in E's case. So far the boys have seen African drumming, assorted tidal/marsh creatures from the Aquarium, and heard stories about other sea creatures. In the weeks to come, there are many more events we plan on catching.
Our annual membership to the children's museum has come in handy as the temperatures have risen, as has the fact that the museum is now opening up at 8 am for early risers. We generally head straight for the art room to get our painting out of the way (and onto the drying racks) and then spend a great deal of time in the golf ball room (where you can roll golf balls on all sorts of tracks and contraptions and learn about momentum and gravity and pulleys and the like) and the water room (where you can float your boats through myriad watery obstacles and learn about irrigation, rain, and water power at the same time). We usually end up in the castle room after eating our sack lunches, where I let the boys run themselves ragged careening through the secret passageways and hurtling up and down the stairs in the turrets. Today it was a bit milder outside, and we got to explore their gardens and old fashioned hand pump they use to water them. We have already made back our investment for the membership and then some--huzzah!
Then there have been some much needed trips to the dentist and the doctor for everyone, relatively mundane trips, though somehow the dentist managed to completely mess up a nerve in my tooth and damage my gums while filling a cavity, but that is all supposedly temporary...and the neurologist I finally went to see told me that the conventional wisdom is now that heart surgery has absolutely no effect on one's subsequent stroke risk after the first event. Umm, awesome? Or awful? Or, just, odd? So it's back on a preventative regime for me and back to ignoring that tiny little strident voice in the back of my head that is now saying "Your stroke risk is now EXACTLY THE SAME as it was when you had the stroke?? WHAT????!!!!" This neurologist also said I needed to see a migraine specialist pronto and referred me to one...whose next available appointment is in NOVEMBER. Good thing I'm not in a hurry or suffering migraines 2-3 times a week, right? SHEESH!
BUT, besides all that health stuff, summer has been fun, fun, fun so far, if ridiculously, terribly hot. As the husband said, the kids must feel like they live on the surface of the sun some days. Don't we all!
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