Um...

So uh, apparently I haven't been posting here, eh?

Has it really been that long? Wow.

This is a post with no substance to it. I'll try to do an update later. But I mean...aren't you my Facebook-friend? And don't you follow me on Twitter and google+ too? Because if so, you already know all there is to know...right?

Meh. But somehow I still feel like there's journaling to be done in LJ-fashion that I don't apparently want to do anywhere else. So I'll be back.

The end of summer in a nutshell

Since I see that my last substantive post was about summer camp, that means I didn't even post here about our last-week-of-summer adventures! So here's a quick recap.

Back in the spring when I was signing the kids up for summer camps, I realized that none of the camps covered the last week before school started (final week of August) so I decided to take that week as vacation and figure something out. After I had put in for the vacation time and been approved, I started to get excited about the idea of taking a whole week to spend with the kids -- to do all the fun stuff around our area that I always want to do, but that we never manage to do because I'm working and I don't want to go places on weekends because I think they'll be too crowded.

( And here's how it went! )

So that was our fun weekend of vacation! It was really awesome.

When I wrote about this on Google+, I called the post "The Power of Yes" and talked about how freeing it was for me to spend that week saying more Yes than No to the kids. (Edit: I cross-posted that essay here on LJ.) In the course of our normal lives, of course, I say No quite a lot, and after a while it starts to wear you down -- both the parent and the kids! So when we were at the amusement parks and so forth, it was so nice to just say Yes. Can I go on that ride? Yes. Can I go on that ride again? Yes. Can I have ice cream? Yes. Can we stay a few more minutes? Yes! It was lovely. At one point grandma had taken Isaac on a ride, and Ruthie and I were waiting for them to come back, and she caught sight of the caramel-apple stand, and she said "can I have a candy apple?" and I said yes. Her little face just blossomed with delight -- she had so obviously expected a No. I bought her the candy apple and, just as I had predicted inside my head, she ate about two bites and then handed it to me. I ate the rest. So, you know, it was crazy to spend $5 on that stupid thing, but worth it anyway.

Of course, then we had to go back to "real life" and back to me saying No a lot, but at least we have our memories.