Can It Be?

The swimming pool on the deck and families we love hanging out with us at hot, sweaty tee ball games are two sure signs that summer has FINALLY arrived.

Can I Pass a 7-Year-Old?

Sam is not always easy to get out of bed in the morning.  When he was three I used to get him dressed for "school" while he was still asleep before waking him to leave the house around 7am.  And this past year I used tricks like mentioning that today was show and share day or reminding him that Wednesdays they go to the computer lab at pre-school.  But this past Saturday I didn't have any trouble waking him at 7am.  He got right out of bed and told me he needed extra toaster waffles for energy.

Earlier in the week I had told him that if he was good he could come down and watch Mommy in her race, that we'd leave Eva behind with Brooklynn and he could come watch me race by the lake before doing his own race.  He wanted to know if The Man was going to help him with the swim part, envisioning, perhaps, a race similar to Trinona, the triathlon we'd watched a friend in earlier this month. When Sam found out he wouldn't be swimming or biking but just running, he was disappointed that he wouldn't get to ride his new Trek but happy that he'd get to show me how fast he was.  In the car on the way there he asked me if it was okay if he passed a 7-year-old, and I told him he could pass anyone he wanted to pass.  The important thing was to have fun.

And fun it was.  He crossed the finish line and got his BK5K medal and told me he wanted to run another race, a longer one.  After all, as he told me on the way home, the 5 in the middle of BK5K on his medal is because he got 5th place.

Just before the finish line of the BK5K Youth Race

 Watching the competition at Trinona, June 9th

Sam takes his new bike for a spin as we're adjusting the seat height

Dinner and a Movie

Finally a chance to catch up with some good friends.  Swimming and bike riding and Monsters Inc. with popcorn.

Perfect Pizza Farm

"Mom!!!!!" he yelled from atop the furthest play structure just south of the gravel road leading to the pizza farm.  "Mom!!!! I have a girlfriend!"  His face lit up with a giant grin.  The little girl's name was Ava and she was the first of many new friends that Sam made last night.

That was perhaps the last time he paid any attention to me for the rest of the evening.  He was off and running with a pack of older boys, playing hide-and-seek tag with 8-year-olds that were a full head taller than him, running up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs that led to the big hill, chasing other kids along the grass path that wrapped around the farm playground, stopping only occasionally to inhale a few strawberries or a slice of wood-fired pepperoni pizza.

Eva started the evening on the baby swing, loving that an adult was willing to push her for long stretches of time, but eventually she branched out and raced around the play house with all the big girls, crawling up the climbing wall and running up the big hill, slowed down only once by the need to pee in the grass.

As I sat in a chair and actually conversed with good friends, at one point laughing harder than I have in months, I remembered last year when I envied the parents of 3-year-olds, moms and dads who were sitting and laughing, not chasing their children.  And although Eva is not completely independent at the pizza farm yet, our family has definitely graduated to the next level.  It didn't hurt to be surrounded by great friends, good people who helped me keep an eye on my kids and made me laugh and appreciate how truly perfect the pizza farm can be.

***See past pizza farm pictures here.

Walking with Eva

What a walk around the neighborhood with Eva looks like:

Garden Gnomes Building Nature

We put in the tomatoes and peppers weeks ago (though they've hardly grown because of the cool temps), but my crazy weekend schedule and the unusually cool, wet weather have kept us from finishing up the garden planting.  But finally my Saturday schedule and the weather cooperated, and we spent the morning checking out our perennials and getting the beans and carrots in the soil.  Sam was a great garden helper, carefully drawing a planting line with a popsicle stick and dropping the beans in one at a time before covering them with soil. 

"We're building nature," he said.  "We had to break down the nature when we stirred the dirt and cut up the weeds, and now we're building new nature."

Winning in the Rain

When Sam asked if he had soccer again tomorrow night on the ride home from the first week of soccer camp, I hoped that soccer might finally hold his interest.  And when he still enjoyed it the second week, I started to believe he'd enjoy all four weeks.  After two weeks of being rained out because of storms in the area, it was no surpise that the organizers didn't cancel for a little rain.  What was the surprise is that it was still a win-win-win for the whole family.

Pre-school Graduation

I slid in to the 4th pew at St. Mary's on Broadway at a little after 11am, and all around me were the smiling faces of the parents who had become our community this year, the same families that had sat in the church the week before when the children sang about God making the world while they wore paper ducks and frogs on their heads.  Logan's mom who was one of the other consistently early drop-off parents (that chatted with me about how boys are different from girls and how do you manage multiple children and will any of us ever make it through the winter without a virus that takes our family down again) waved at me from the other side of the aisle.  Amy played with the zoom lens of her camera and quieted Gavin's little sisters.  Becky smiled from the second pew, her recent happiness and healthiness seeping out of her pores.  Kate slid in beside me and I nervously touched on the subject of the night before when I'd actually gone on a date, and then the kids started filing in wearing little graduation caps made of blue construction paper.  These children and their parents had become a type of family for us, a group of predictable friends who would be there and help us out when we needed them, boys that Sam could play with and girls that could boss him around and fawn over his little sister.  Hamilton and Gavin and Gedion and Anthony and Logan and Elizabeth and Brooklynn and Luke.  Friends all.  And they were all truly blessed to have two extraordinary teachers in Mrs. Hefel and Mrs. Norton.  Is it any wonder that although I had sneered at the idea of a pre-school graduation I had tears in my eyes when it was all over?

And some pictures from last week's pre-school song program and social hour: