Why you won’t hear from us for a few days

• Lily ate one or two bites of about 7 different peaches in one evening,
• Elsie started preschool,
• Timmy sang “A tootie ta, a tootie ta, a tootie ta too! for the family with his thumbs up, elbows back, feet out, bottom up, tongue out, and while jumping around in a circle.
• Abby came down to set the table (her job this week) before doing anything else and without complaining,
• Kate read through several “Jigsaw Jones” books and ran out,
• Gina spent two mornings on the cell phone trying to figure out how to get our phone and internet back working, and
• I biked to work 3 out of 5 days.

If you didn’t catch it from Gina’s entry, we are without phone and internet for a little while–our modem seems to have been fried during a lightning storm and since we use VOIP, our phone is gone too.  We’re having a great time.  (This is posted from the library.)

First week of school

• Lily played outside in our huge puddle and came in very happy but very wet,
• Elsie met her preschool teacher,
• Timmy had his first day of kindergarten,
• Abby turned 7,
• Kate took a huge bag of to Stake conference to keep herself occupied,
• Gina got two large objects removed from her nose, and
• I completed a driver to control a frequency filter using LabView and also installed Meep and ran my first FDTD simulation.

Help, the Olympics, and a recovering mother

• Lily amazed her grandmother Jones with the contrast between her glowing smile and her stormy glower,
• Elsie learned how to make the “f” sound (but hasn’t started using it regularly),
• Timmy held his own pretty well in several rounds of paper airplane golf,
• Abby decided that she wanted to be in the Olympics for swimming in 4 years,
• Kate had most of her hair chopped off,
• Gina had an operation that involved the burning of near-sinus tissues by an electric current oscillating in the radio frequency regime,
• I spent too many nights staying up late to watch the Olympics,
• and Gina’s mom switched places every meal so that all the kids would get their turn sitting by her.

Best race I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know how that happened, but the 4X100 men’s relay race was the best race I’ve ever seen.  Wow.

A biased account

• Lily raced for the boy’s bathroom every chance she got at the swimming pool (Gina was there and I wasn’t),
• Elsie used the front bush as a toilet (1 and 2),
• Timmy dumped water into the 5 gallon flour bucket to see what would happen,
• Abby ripped the curtains down playing “hide and seek” in the storage room,
• Kate refused to eat just about every dinner,
• Gina stayed up past midnight reading a good book and spent the next day in resolute fatigue, and
• I was the normal well-behaved soul that my mother knows so well.

Edamame

• Lily learned to scoot down the stairs, one step at a time, on her bottom,
• Elsie only let “Mommy” help her brush her teeth,
• Timmy insisted on “Daddy,”
• Abby fell in love with her new dresser and mirror,
• Kate learned to float (hard for her build) and do the back stroke,
• Gina got 17 bottles of apricots picked, cored, and bottled as puree (for sorbet!), and
• I weighed myself at the beginning and end of my fast (change=8.4 lbs).