Summer Doings

Time to get back at it. After the long holiday week, bookended by trips down to the lake house, we’re finally home for what should be a very quiet week at home.

Last week we had my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter from Boston staying with us. It was good to catch up and hang out with them. The two-year-old, we’ll call her Little L, has reached the hilarious stage of kid-dom. She does funny things and then continues to do them when they get a reaction. Our favorite thing she did was calling me “Uncle Ken” and S “Aunt Cindy” all week. I’d go walking through the room and hear a little voice say, “Bye Uncle Ken!” Apparently she does have a great uncle Ken, but he and I have zero in common in appearance. And Cindy is the Asian lady who runs her daycare. So we’re not really sure how we got labelled with those names. It made us laugh all week, though.

She has a fun way with words because of her background and how she spends her days. Her mom is from Kuwait, so Little L has learned Arabic from day one. The daycare she goes to in Boston is run by Chinese women, so she learns Mandarin from them. She does the normal, two-year-old babbling where you can only pick out a word or two clearly from every 7–8. With her you wonder are those words you miss really either Arabic or Mandarin words and she just said something that makes perfect grammatical sense if you allow for three languages. She’s going to be one smart cookie!

This weekend we had three families from St. P’s down to the lake house, 18 people total. It was a busy and fun weekend.

C got to check out a little early as she headed down to CYO camp yesterday afternoon. This is her first time going and she was super excited. We’re a little nervous about her going away simply because every time she has a sleep over she gets herself worked up and ends up with a stomach ache or headache or sleeps weird and can’t move her neck without pain for three days or some other weird ailment.[1] She’s in a cabin with at least five of her classmates from St. P’s, so hopefully they’re getting so wiped out during the day that she can pass out at night.

L is camping it this week, too, although she’s just going to a half-day basketball camp five minutes from our house. She’s in a group with four classmates and apparently they are the only girls in a camp of about 100 kids. She claims they still “dominated” at today’s session, but she always says that. She was pretty excited to get her school shoes early so she would have new kicks for camp. She picked out some Kyrie Irving 3s with matching socks this year. But she also got a new Steph Curry ball so she’s properly representing her favorite player.

So M and I are home alone for three hours a day all week. She went shopping with S this morning, as S had no meetings today. But the next four days I imagine will involve her sitting in her room reading and listening to music on her iPhone while I sit in another room and read and listen to music on my iPad. Apples falling close to trees and whatnot.

As much as we love going to the lake and sharing it with friends and family, we’re kind of glad to be taking next weekend off. It’ll be nice to have a quick break and do some summer things closer to home.