Family Night

Sorry we fell off the blogosphere for a while... we had annual conference a week ago and have been busy since then with a lot of church and family responsibilities. To bring you up to speed in brief: Josie has started summer school to get ready to kindergarten and LOVES it. The schedule has been tough on her as she comes home exhausted every day, but she is enjoying the class, her teacher, and the classroom atmosphere. After a couple days of new routine at school, we whisked her away to Annual Conference where she and Norah stayed with Eric's parents while we spent hour upon hour in meetings (don't read me wrong here... while it is a weekend full of long meetings, it is also a great weekend of catching up with colleagues and friends we rarely see). Now we are back, Josie is back into routine at school and we are once again finding routine as family. When will we be done looking for routine and actually be living into one... I have no idea.

Friday night we had the chance to kick back and enjoy some family time. After a low-key afternoon at home, we went out to the old city park where we did some exploring. One of the benefits of Josie being in school is that she has become much braver than she used to be. At the park, she took great delight in trying new things -- here she is giving the monkey bars a shot:

After playing at the little park, we decided to walk around the lake. Norah kangaroo-ed with me:

As we walked around the lake, there were several health stations to stop at -- stretching, chin ups, parallel bars, etc. Josie, being the new brave girl that she is, made an attempt to try every station. Some stations were much more accessible to her than others, but she wanted to try them and she wanted to do so on her own without help from us. I think the balance beam and the stretching stations were among her favorite.



Norah enjoyed the walk as she watched Josie on the health stations. Norah's only real complaint was the sunshine that kept shining in her eyes -- so complain she did:

But the evening ended on a couple of high notes. As Eric and Josie walked together, they turned around to see their shadows. Josie was amazed at how BIG their shadows were and thought we should take a picture:



The other high note was a treat at Dairy Queen.
Now the weekend is upon us and we are back into church mode. This week, Norah starts daycare @ Pam's for a few weeks while Josie is in summer school. At the end of June, Josie will go back to Pam's and Norah will come back to our college sitter before rejoining the child-care/preschool crowd once Josie starts school in August. Sound confusing? Indeed it is. Don't feel bad if you can't keep up -- we hardly can, either.