Summer Livin'

I haven’t posted on the blog in a million years. I even stopped the Greater Good Gratitude Journal for the summer.

I blame swimming lessons. I signed Chiara up for 6 weeks of swimming lessons, 6 days a weeks and it has thrown off my whole rhythm of writing. It has also made my daughter hate me, as she harbors a deep hatred for the swimming pool, which she conveniently forgets during the actual half-hour of the lesson and inconveniently remembers for the next 23 ½ hours.

Here’s some stuff I meant to post but didn’t:

Matt’s working in Cupertino for the summer on iStuff. He loves it, although the commute makes us all grouchy.

Speaking of grouchy, Wagner has a song he sings. (Wagner is always singing.) This one is to the tune of Frère Jacques minus the first two lines. 

It goes like this:

Grumpy Grumpy Grumpy!
Grumpy Grumpy Grumpy!
Grumpypants!
Grumpypants!

He likes to sing it to Chiara on the way to swimming lessons.

I am also happy to report that the boys are now wearing their underpants the normal way. For a very long time they would go to the potty but refused to wear anything but diapers. (Michael kept complaining that his penis would get “stuck”—which was never independently verified.) Finally I broke down and bought 31 pairs of underpants, most which were either Thomas the Tank Engine or Lightening McQueen. It made the underpants more enticing than the diapers, but then the boys would only wear them backwards. (Because the logo is bigger on the back).

I would have sent them onward through middle school and beyond with backwards-facing underpants, but luckily my mother came in worked her magic. I was gone for a week at the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop again and my mom and stepdad held up the fort here at home. And one of the things that Nonna did (in addition to getting Chiara to swimming lessons) was get the boys underwear frontside-front.

So now summer’s practically over. We’ve got three more weeks of swimming lessons and Matt’s got three more weeks of commuting to Apple. He’s lining up interviews for next summer’s jobs at law firms. And before you know it, it’ll time for kindergarten and CoR.

WAIT! I buried the lead! Not on purpose. I just forgot.

The boys are no longer preemies! We had our final follow-up with the NICU and the boys tested between 29 months (their chronological age) and 42 months. 29 months because they can’t jump with both feet of the ground and 42 months for...drum roll... LANGUAGE SKILLS! Someday someday someday I’ll write a post on the follow-up exam but with all these swimming lessons, who knows when that will be.

And now, here’s why I sat down to write something on the blog in the first place—Wagner invented a term for grated parmesan. He calls it “cheese dust.”