gettin' busy livin'

So to anyone who has even a moderate interest in reading this blog (this is you, Grandma and Gemma), I'm sorry. I have been quite remiss in keeping up with our exploits over the past few months. The task of summing up even a week or two is pretty overwhelming sometimes, so I let it slide. And the farther behind I got, the more insurmountable the job seemed to get...

...so I'm not going to surmount it, I decided. :) This decision was made easier by the fact that our computer died a dramatic, smoky death this afternoon, so I currently do not have a way to upload the many pictures I am lacking. So there's my excuse, and my motivation: I have to provide a quick recap of our summer before we get a new computer that I can add pictures to!

Okay, here goes:

• Our summer was good, but HOT. I stopped keeping track of how many days reached over 100--it was just too depressing. Luckily, two-year-olds are pretty entertained by pretty much anything, since we spent most of the summer hiding from the sun. Crayons, markers, play-doh, and Diego have been our constant companions.


• Potty training is going great! Lily has had about 3 accidents since mid-June. Noah is less reliable, but does a pretty good job staying dry and he is F-I-N-A-L-L-Y starting to poo in the potty! Sometimes growing up is hard to do.


• The kids are still learning so much, it's unbelievable. They know all their letters, upper- and lowercase, and they know most of the letter sounds. (Thank you, Starfall and Leapfrog!) They can both count to ten in English and Spanish, and Noah recognizes numbers to ten. They love to "read" books--they remember quite a bit!


• Lily and Noah are talking SO much these days! Lily's sentences are getting more and more perfect and detailed, and she's making new connections all the time. Today we saw rainclouds, and I explained that it had rained a little, and how much we need the rain. She looked up in the middle of the Walmart parking lot and said, "We need rain, please, God!" I don't know how much she understands about prayer and God and our needs, but it's apparently more than I had given her credit for!


• Noah is quite the control freak lately. It makes me very tired, although I know it's completely normal. There are very well-defined limits throughout our days; there are specific things that I'm allowed to do, and many other things that Noah HAS to do for himself. As a result, he's able to do things like get himself completely dressed with almost no help from me. (I'm allowed to put on his shoes if he tries and fails.)


• The kids are loving day care, which we call "school". They are always asking if we "Go skoo' 'mowwow?" We have lots of discussions about the days of the week and what we're doing on which days.


• Things have been pretty crazy here over the past month or so. On September 4, a huge fire started, which destroyed over 1500 homes and something like 34,000 acres of land. Nobody is sure what the community will look like from now on, but the response from the state and the rest of the country has been pretty amazing. It's been pretty cool to see how God has provided in so many ways, even amid such a tragedy.