Bella, Gabe and Josiah

The first week of school went well. I’m fact, Gabe was upset that today was Saturday and he couldn’t go to school. Josy couldn’t figure it what to wear since I wouldn’t let him wear his uniform… After the first day, Gabe informed me that “if all days are like this, I will veto all vacations!” I think we made a good choice putting them in this new school.

When I picked up Gabe from school today, he handed me a Linz chocolate and told me it was for me. He’d gotten it from their picnic and he knew it was my favorite. So he took one bit and then saved the rest for me. Sweetest kid ever.

Gabe spent all week last week counting down the days to the first day of school. He’s so ready to start!! And Josy popped straight out of bed this morning, ready to meet his new friends. So here we go. 2nd grade and Pre-K.

For our last week of summer break, we tried to shove in as much fun as we could. Pat was gone on a work trip and everyone else had gone home, so it was just the three of us. We met some friends at the park one day. Gabe got legitimately stuck and it took both me and the other mom to pull him out… Freddy took a nice long nap while snuggling with a pair of pants. Doesn’t every cat do that??? We built some magnatile towers, sometimes filling them with Timmy, Puddles, Fox and any other snuggle buddy they could find. We had some extra cardboard, so Gabe was inspired to make shields. This meant that we’ve now had a lot of epic sword fights. And then on Friday, it was the last day of summer. It was Josy’s last day of daycare ever, which was a little hard on his mama… I told Josy that he could pick a special treat for his last day of school and he picked hot chocolate. And then I dropped him off for the last time. Gabe was crushed that Josy had picked hot chocolate over donuts, so I told that

I’ve been planning to take the boys to play on the trail that Matt and I used to play in all summer, but it just hasn’t happened. It doesn’t help that every time I suggest it, Gabe informs me that he’d rather go to the park and play ball… Anyway, I finally made it happen. However, this trail absolutely got flooded a couple of weeks ago and the trail was a mess. And certain little boys would have had a more pleasant trip if they’d listened to their mama when she told them to wear boots… Gramps met us part way down the trail and then we walked around a pond, which was in much better shape. It was a little further away from the river, which helped. Unfortunately, it was a little hard on Josy…

While we still had piles of people here, we decided to hike out to the waterfall. Hiking with little kids involves a lot of climbing on rocks, jumping out and scaring people and absolutely no risk of bears… Also, my phone case was scratched and any picture I took was blurry, so I ended up using the front camera a lot or just not taking pictures… Since the salmon are running, we decided to try and see a bear, which involved telling the kids to be very, very quiet, which only sort of worked. However, we did see a mama bear grab a fish to feed to her babies. Since my case was scratched I didn’t even try and take a picture, I screen shot these from the video my friend took, but this was easily the coolest bear experience I’ve ever had. We were in the bridge and she was chasing the fish right below us.

With all the extra people in town and the weather being amazing, we decided to hike the mountain! 16 people, one of which was 2 and two of which were 4 made for a very slow trip up the mountain… About halfway up, half of them decided to turn around so they could explore more things while the weather was still good, but the rest of us (including Josy!) made it to the top! Josy desperately wanted to go down the tram. Since Gram and Gramps didn’t want to hike back down, they took Josy with them. He thought it was wonderful and just wanted to keep going up and down. Meanwhile, Pat, Gabe and I hiked all the way back down and had some really good conversations that we would not have been able to have if we’d had Josy. We also would have gone much more slowly… Then we met up with Gram and Gramps, Josy, Rob and Adriana for dinner.