There are 34 days left of summer vacation. Yikes! This summer is flying by way too fast!! I have loved hanging out with my girls so far this summer and the thought of not having them here each day makes me panic a bit. But not enough, to like,
not send them to school :)
Casey and I are similar in many ways (as scary as that is for me to admit) and one of those similarities is that we are both breakfast people. Casey wakes up and is ready to eat within minutes. I can wait for a little while, but my day always begins with breakfast. Tom seems to drink his breakfast from a coffee mug most days and Emily, well, Emily is pretty finicky when it comes to breakfast. I guess maybe she's like Tom in that she would drink her breakfast as well (milk, though) if I left her alone, but I just really believe in eating a good breakfast to start the day off right. So for the past 4 years, I've struggled through breakfast time with Emily. We've tried just about everything to appeal to her taste - oatmeal, yogurt, cereal, eggs, bacon, english muffins, pancakes, fruit bars, granola bars - she wants none of it for very long. We've enjoyed some short runs of cereal and bars, but I'm sure she's really just trying to make me happy. We've recently discovered the yummy goodness of Nutella on toast as a side to her cup of milk and that seems to have caught her attention. It's a bit of a mess, though. I took some pictures as proof of what I will endure to clean up in order to assure she gets a good breakfast :)
Today I cut the toast into 4 pieces, hoping to minimize the mess. But before she dug in I asked her how many pieces of toast she had. I was testing her to see if the counting practices we've been doing have clicked. She very precisely extended her index finger and pointed while she counted 1, 2, 3, 4. Sister's got some counting skills going on!!! I immediately praised her and of course she began clapping and saying 'yeah!' to join in my excitement. Once again, I am overwhelmed with these small successes and so grateful they keep coming. When I told Tom, he didn't seem all that surprised. I expect greatness of her like Tom, but I, being the emotional mom, always find myself basking in the journey we took to get here. Damned, I'm going to jump up and down in the kitchen at 7:30 in the morning over some counting, because she couldn't do it before. And now she can. And we're on our way to checking some more off our list. Time to bring out the big guns - the M&M's. We're going to be counting to 10 and beyond before summer is over. We've got 34 days to get busy.
We've not done much this week because I've been busy doing some consulting work, but that doesn't mean we haven't had some fun in small ways here. Playing Barbies, dressing up, coloring, and reading have been pretty routine. I've tried to take some pictures of the the girls doing random things and I am amazed that so many pictures (too many to count or share here) are of the girls looking anywhere but at the camera. It's not like I have a fantastic camera (yet - I really am hoping to get a SLR camera this year) but pictures are taken for memory's sake and I treasure these snapshots in time. I look at our little photos and then look at those kids in The Gap ads and realize neither of my kids could do the model gig. They just cannot look at the camera.
And if they, do I get a real charmer like this one.
Did you see the sticker on her shirt? It was only after I saw this picture, I noticed the irony of the sticker :)
No worries, though, on our boring week this week. We'll be sure to hit some parks, pools and ice cream joints next week. Casey and I decided we want to sample as many different ice cream shops and stands as we can the rest of the summer. We'll be keeping count and declaring a winner among us. And we've saved our family vacation to Hilton Head for the end of summer this year and I've most definitely begun counting down the days until we go.
No comments:
Post a Comment