Towel Time

I just wrote yesterday about how wishy-washy I was feeling about the half in two weeks (well, one and a half weeks now), but then this morning I was back at the track, and 8 miles later, my confidence has been completely restored.

I loved, loved, loved this workout - 1600, 1200, 800, 400, and 200 - and of course as the repeats got shorter, the pace got faster. It was so great that I did it twice! Crazy talk, right?  But it did the trick. I now can't wait to hit that starting line in Jamestown - hooray!!!

And that whole Summer of Balance thing I wrote about a few weeks ago? Well, we're two weeks into summer now, and we're still working on it. Three hours into their vacation, the boys had a full-on brawl, complete with punching and screaming. And this afternoon I fended off nearly two hours of "what are we going to dooooooo?" lamentations.

Transitions are tough, and we've had our ups and downs (not helped by my being stuck on the couch for much of last week), but I think we're getting there. Understanding that it's a time of transition and it's going to take some time to get into a good rhythm is helpful - makes me realize that it's normal, and my kids aren't just being pains in the butt.

As we get into our summer rhythm, we've had some fun outings, and we've had some down time - and I can now say that it's officially the summer season, because the beach stuff has taken up permanent residence in the back of the car, and will stay there until Labor Day.

Going to the beach with Carmine this year is proving somewhat challenging, as I knew it would. He's at the perfect age for creating trouble - wandering off, throwing sand, smashing people's sand castles. It's nonstop fun.

It is fun, though, in between all the micromanaging I have to do. And thankfully Gabe and Dante are very independent at the beach now, and are usually perfectly content to dig huge canals in the mud or spend hours boogie boarding, so aside from breaking up the occasional squabble between G and D, I'm able to devote the bulk of my attention to keeping Carmine out of trouble.

He does love the beach, though. He's not crazy about the water, and won't go near it unless he has a death grip on me, but he will dump buckets of it on himself over and over and over again. Which, of course, means that after he dumps the bucket out, he immediately asks for "yes please more wawa now, please."  And when he hits me with the double 'please,' I have a hard time saying no.

He also enjoys wrapping up in his towel and sitting on his chair. He calls it "towel time" - as in, he comes running over to me, nodding his head vigorously and pointing to his chair, and yells "oh yeah Mommy, now towel time!"

And he also comes running over to me with a fistful of sand in each of his hands, and says "one sand castle." Eventually he'll figure out that two fistfuls of sand do not a sand castle make, but for now, it works, so I'm not going to tell him differently.

Despite being two weeks into summer vacation, I'm still working on sifting through the stacks of paper the boys brought home on the last day of school. Gabe dumped out his backpack on the table and said "Mommy, we cleaned out our desks and it was like a tornado of paper!" A very apt description, I thought.

One of the papers I found had some of his spelling word sentences on it, and Scott and I both had cameos. Scott's:  "My dad's job makes him stressful."  Mine: "My mom is beautiful."  I think I win that round : )

Gabe also completely melted my heart the other night. We were driving past a restaurant in town that recently added a rooftop deck for dining, and I pointed it out to them. Gabe said "Hey, that's the perfect spot for a date!" Of course I asked him who he'd take there on a date, and he answered "I thought we could go there for our next Mommy and Gabe night out."  So nice to know I'm still his date of choice : )

Carmine, my smarty McSmart pants, now can recognize every letter in the alphabet, as well as the numbers 1 through 10. I love how quickly he seems to soak things up - he's learning so much so fast, and seems to be changing a LOT right now. His pronunciation of so many words has gotten so much clearer - he actually says "Mickey" now, instead of "Mitt-mey." But then he still says "yook" and "yunch," because he can't quite get the "l" sound out.

He and Dante are reading buddies now. He loves to have anyone read to him, but given the choice, he'll choose Dante. He loves nothing more than sitting on his bed while Dante reads him books, and it's one of the cutest things I've ever seen in the world.

Last night Dante was reading to him before bed, and I was going to sit down with them, but Carmine waved me away and said "No mommy go shut door now." He wanted to hang out with his big brother - no mommies allowed. I was a little sad, but also really happy to see the two of them having that special time together (I left the door open a crack and peeked in on them).

Dante's becoming quite the big kid, too. He's finally really close to losing his first tooth, which is going to be a HUGE occasion, because he's been waiting a long, long time for it (as have we all!). He's also moved up to the next level in his swim class, and is happily jumping into the deep end and swimming really well. I love to see how much fun he has in the water - and now that it's beach season, he's getting so much more practice - he'll be doing laps in the pool before we know it! 

He happened to see a picture or video clip of a Lady Gaga song one day recently, and the song came on the radio while we were driving in the car the other day, and he asked me why "the ladies in that movie were all wearing bathing suits."

I am fully aware that having three teenage boys is going to be easier in some ways than it would be to have three teenage girls, but man, there are still going to be a lot of awkward/uncomfortable discussions we're going to have in the near future. And it's going to make things like potty training and sibling squabbling seem like a piece of cake.

Comments

[Laura]

I'm glad you had such a confidence building run, that's awesome! Enjoy the holiday today. :)

[Michelle]

Thanks : ) Hope you had a good 4th!