Smiles

Here's Amity on her last day of Camp CBI. Looks happy, no? As far as we can tell, she had a wonderful 6 weeks and is looking forward to school starting up in another month. In the meantime, we'll take her mind off the absence of school by taking an insanely long road trip to Montreal (by way of family in Upstate NY) and Michigan, be home for a week, and then spend a week at the Eastern Shore of VA with friends. That ought to take a bit of the sting out of being away from her "CBI friends."

Chopping Cukes

There are so many things we love about CBI Camp|School. Here's an example. Amity gets to practice all kinds of fine motor skills and self-efficacy chopping these cucumbers. Even better though is that the cukes she chopped were then mixed with a bunch of other ingredients to make a pasta salad. That pasta salad was then delivered to the soup kitchen across the street. Fine motor skills and helping to feed our community. Amity's a rock star.

Zara's 7th Birthday, Observed

Zara and her friend Vivien had a joint birthday party this year. Since we had two birthday girls, we figured we should have 2 cakes. 1 was an ice cream cake which was quite delicious but not pictured here. The other cake, as imagined by Z and V, was a marble cake decorated as a nautilus shell. Here we see the whole family working to mix the cake ingredients together. While Amity was napping, Zara tried her hand at frosting the cake. In the final picture, Wes is decorating as Zara looks on. While the eating is also not pictured here, this cake was fantastically yummy. And I don't even like cake!

4th of July Faces

We've spent the 4th of July out of town for the last few years, so Zara was especially excited to have the opportunity to dress up for it this year. As is typical in our house, Zara's excitement is contagious, so Amity wanted to wear a red, white and blue outfit and face paint as well. We picked Zara up from camp a bit early (they were in the middle of a USA vs Commonwealth counselor water balloon fight) and went to a pool party with friends, complete with grilling and mosquitoes. A perfect celebration!

Power-less

For a variety of reasons I shall not get into here, coupled with an extraordinary amount of luck/karma/whathaveyou, we've spent 6 years in this house and have never lost power for more than a few minutes. All good things must come to an end, and that streak ended with a whimper (from us) on June 29, 2012. Ironically, we lost power after the super windy, super rainy storm has passed us by. But no power when we went to sleep Friday night, and no power for the next several days, either. Worst part was it was clearly a very local outage - Olinda Drive, around the corner from us, had power, and so did houses just up the block. Maybe 12 houses in total were affected.

Other worse part would be the 90-something degree day temperatures. While it would drop down into the 70s at night, there was no real way, besides just opening windows, to circulate air through the house. We made it through the first three nights sleeping in the basement, but by Monday, even the basement was pretty unpleasant. The temperature upstairs had reached about 89 degrees, and downstairs was rapidly catching up. On the 4th powerless day, we packed up the house and took refuge with our friends Peggy and Avrom (and their kiddos E and S). This picture was taken that afternoon, and we luxuriated in the A/C. Amity and S got on quite well and were enjoying parallel artistic pursuits while their big sisters were at camp.

Power came back the following morning. I had never been so happy to see a Dominion truck before! Many thanks to the Tobiases (and the Zimmermans, and all of the other families who offered to cool us, feed us, shelter us, and let us use their internet and showers, but not at the same time). We have the power again.

Birthday Bike

Marmee and Buelo Phil gave Zara her next big girl bike for her birthday this year. Here she is taking it for a test drive. Looking good, Z!

Happy 7th Birthday, Zara!

Zara chose to go to Triple C on her birthday this summer (we offered she could stay home from camp that day, but she declined). We were planning the usual evening celebration at Red Robin, but to start her day off right we all had birthday blueberry muffins and sang her happy birthday at 7:30 in the morning. The zebra bandana (which, curiously, she is also wearing, as a babushka, on her sixth birthday) was an accessory for "wild west" dress up day at camp. She also had a sheriff badge that said "birthday gal" (sadly, not pictured).

Amity's First Haircut

Amity has been asking to have her hair cut for awhile now. Wes has been on board but I've been dragging my heels. Finally, I gave in. I will miss her adorable curl (of course we saved it!) but have to admit her hair looks very cute now (though ponytails are a bit harder). She was a champ, sat relatively still while Wes, in family tradition, gave her her first haircut. Notice the hypnotic effect the movie they are watching has on not just Amity but Zara, too.

The wooded path (connecting parts of the Monticello Trail)

We were feeling inspired to take a little hike, but wanted to do something close (under 10 minutes from home) and yet somehow also novel. The answer turned out to be the lovely, berry speckled (and boy did we eat a lot of berries) path that is a "short" (actually I'm pretty sure it is longer) cut between 2 parts of the Monticello trail. Along the way we found this plaque, which I'm pretty sure hardly anyone ever sees... but hey, novel. Mission accomplished.

Amity's First Day of Camp

Here are 3 glimpses of Amity's first ever day at CBI. In the first picture, she and Zara are getting ready to head out to their respective camps. The second and third pictures were taken by Jill at CBI after Wes dropped Amity off, to show that yes, in fact, Amity was having a good time. We've heard nothing but great things from Amity and her counselors Emily and Gemma. Double bonus is that Emily will be one of her preschool teachers this Fall. Ah, we're all happy to be back at CBI!