Partial to the bean…

Hi, how have you been? I haven’t written a blog post in a while. This will be a long one.

40 days left until school starts.

18 days until Alice’s birthday.

Where has the time gone? I’ve spent the entirety of summer break so far with a panicky lightness in my chest and that close-to-tears feeling in my eyes. I can’t get on top of all of the things I have to do, and all of the things I want to do, and all of the things we already paid for and damn well better do before it’s TOO LATE, dangit.

And now I see that I’ve posted so infrequently in the past two months that my main blog page only shows three entries. I am officially shamed. Let’s see how long I can make this post…

Last week the girls and I made our yearly trip to Rehoboth Beach for a 2-night getaway, and it was tons o’fun. We found a new place for breakfast, revisited our favorite restaurants and shops, ate a metric butt-ton of delicious treats, and even actually spent some time on the actual beach. Sammi went out past the breakers with us for the first time ever, and really liked it except for the fact that she was freezing her patooky off. I think an offshore storm was sending cooler water in, because the ocean was colder than it usually is in the summer.

Our Rehoboth trip is a tradition that I absolutely love. Anth doesn’t relish revisiting the same place year after year — if he’s going to take time off of work for a vacation, he usually wants to be going somewhere new, or at least somewhere that still feels partially unexplored. Rehoboth, in comparison, is a very known quantity for us, but the girls and I hotly anticipate our yearly trek: staying at the same hotel, eating at the same restaurants, shopping at the same stores — knowing everything that’s there makes it easy for us to get excited about coming back again. And Kilwin’s has the best fudge anywhere.

Speaking of yearly traditions, the girls and I went to Dutch Wonderland yesterday. We’ve done this several summers in a row now, thanks to cheapish group-buy tickets bought through a local homeschooling group. This is an amusement park that my grandma took me to many times when I was little. I know its layout as well as I know the streets of my home town, and now my kids do, too. It’s not a huge park, and it has its flaws (most notably in the realm of concessions), but spending one lovely summer day there each year seems to be exactly the right amount of time for us. This year’s visit was a bit more fraught than previous years — Sammi is now too tall for some rides she rather enjoys, yet not emotionally “big” enough to join her sister on the faster rides, regardless of the amount of begging her sister will expend — but I think we’ve got at least another year or two of this tradition before it becomes completely unworkable.

(Apologies for any typos in this post, by the way… I’ve just discovered that my proofreading plug-in has gone kerplooie. How irritating!)

Let’s see, what else has happened lately?

Alice got her new glasses and has been extremely careful with them. I don’t think she wore them on a single ride yesterday, even the relatively tame ones. Lesson learned.

We hung our hummingbird feeder on the deck, and have been getting regular visits. I had no idea there were so many of those little buzzers living in the neighborhood, nor did I know that they would come and perch on the feeder and take long, lingering drinks. I thought they were all about the hovering.

Sammi has figured out how to swim! It’s rather tiring for her to do it, as she has approximately zero buoyancy and tends to flail her limbs in a manner perhaps slightly more manic than strictly necessary, but she can actually move herself from point A to point B through the water now, as long as the distance from A to B is less than 6 feet or so. This is a big deal for her, and something I was hoping she’d accomplish this summer, because it seemed like she was pretty close at the very end of last summer.

We signed up for an offsite backup service for computer stuff. The initial backup has been running for 16 days and is only 32% done. Erm. We have a lot of stuff. Probably should have signed up for this a while ago. Especially because Anth is getting that “hard drive failure imminent” feeling again, so now it’s like a race — which will finish first: the backup, or the hard drive? Bleh.

Tonight I’m going to see They Might Be Giants in concert. I’m having a hard time getting excited about this, to be honest. I’ve only had their new album for a week, and I’m only just starting to get into it a little. At this point I think that I would choose a quite evening at home tonight over driving myself an hour each way to hang out in a hot and crowded room, listening to loud live music with a bunch of sweaty twenty-somethings. Yes, I am a very very old lady and should probably go put on a shawl now. You kids get off my lawn.

I am much more excited about the concert I’m going to in September: They Might Be Giants again, but this time (a) Jonathan Coulton is opening, and (b) Alice is coming with me! It’s a 14 and up show, and she’ll be 14 by then, so this will be her first real concert. We are extremely stoked about seeing JoCo live. Sammi is very VERY sad that she can’t come, too.

But hey, that’s not until the fall, and this entry’s about summer, right? I think I’ve hit the high points of the recent weeks. I need to post some pictures soon, which I hope I’ll do in the next few days. Who knows, though, really. Clearly blogging on a regular basis is one of those aforementioned things that I can’t get on top of lately. I’m doing the best I can, I think. I hope…

Alice is at Six Flags with a friend today, and she just called me in tears: She was on a roller coaster and her glasses flew off her face and were lost. I calmed her down and suggested that she check in with the park office now and again before they leave, just in case someone turns them in (highly unlikely, but it never hurts to hope). I guess we’ll go to LensCrafters tomorrow, because she can’t really survive without glasses for the 5-7 days it normally takes her eye doctor to get new glasses made.

Funnily enough, I actually have Alice’s prescription in hand right now, because I was thinking about ordering her some secondary “fashion” glasses from Zenni. I’ve never bothered to get anyone’s prescription from our doctor before, and yet I have hers now. Maybe I made this happen. Heh. Anyway, as I said to Anth just now, we’re pretty lucky to have gotten through this many person-years without any previous glasstastrophes, so I’m fine with getting her a pair of “glasses in about an hour” tomorrow. While we’re waiting, she can try on other frames in anticipation of a Zenni order.

Sammi had her much-delayed birthday parti yesterday. I have to say that, while there were no major disasters and everyone seemed to more or less enjoy themselves, it was not one of my better efforts. I’m about over the whole “general gathering” kind of party. It was a relief to me when Alice grew out of that sort of party and started wanting to do smaller slumber parties, or fun outings with her closest BFFs, instead. I think it’s about time (push push push) for Sammi to hit that stage now, because I think I’m partied out for good.