Snippets

I bought Olivia new shoes for school this weekend. The shoes I bought are an adult size 8. She’s ten and a half. Yikes!

I think it’s starting to hit Alyssa that we are heading to Indy for a Pentatonix concert on Thursday. We get to see Julie and Riley – YAY!! Alyssa said yesterday, “Only four more days…” Then her eyes got all dreamy. She’s just so flipping cute.

This summer has been…different. We didn’t go on our ‘big’ vacation to Cedar Point this year. With my mom heading off to Alabama with her sisters and her mother to see her mom’s long-lost, newly-found sisters, we just didn’t fit the Cedar Point trip in the schedule.

Instead, we’ve done a day here and there and honestly, it’s been kind of awesome. We did the water park, the lake, the pool. Last week we spent a day at my mom’s and the kids just played on the slip-n-slide and ate outside on her deck and roasted marshmallows over candles. And I got to just be with them. We weren’t on a schedule, we didn’t have anywhere to be. It was really nice.

We’ve seen a few movies, gone shopping at the mall even when we didn’t actually need anything. Those are days where the stress is low and the fun is high. I’m all about those kinds of days.

Alyssa has had band ‘camp’ (I put camp in quotes because it’s really been more like band class, in that she goes to the school, plays her flute, marches and learns music and choreography for about seven hours a day and then comes home. To me, camp should be an overnight thing. But whatever.) and she’s enjoyed it. I think she’s like seeing her friends daily this for a few weeks this summer.

Olivia has spent a lot of time in a giant box Tom brought in and cut a door and windows into. He even cut a small hole through which she could feed the plug of her tablet through. She sits in there (the walls are decorated with pictures she printed off) and reads/writes fan-fiction about the Despicable Me girls and the Inside Out emotions. I leave clean pajamas for her to change in to each morning when she wakes up. She doesn’t get dressed in actual clothes unless we’re going somewhere, which is usually just on Saturdays. I envy her Summer of Pajamas. She’s growing up and figuring out her own interests. I’m excited to see who she’s becoming.

Tom works in the yard and the garden. He lists things on Ebay, sells crap from the end of our driveway and basically just takes good care of us.

I do the laundry, bake all the berry things and sit back and marvel that this is my life.