We started our summer off with a trip to the Charleston area for a beach vacation with our friends, Josh and Cris and their kids, Carter and Kennedy. (Well, technically we started the summer by moving into an apartment, but whatever.)
We rented a house in Isle of Palms that was only a short walk from the beach. It was great!
Running amuck on the beach on our first night there:
On the beach:
We also had access to three pools!
Un-synchronized Jumping
Stay tuned for more!
As in, the last night we slept in our old house!
That’s right! For those of you out of the loop, we sold our house! In less than a week! We did NOT expect it to sell so quickly!
We were supposed to close on it June 1st, so we began moving out of it the week before, into an APARTMENT because we had not found a new home yet! (Well, we had found a home, but couldn’t move into it until the end of July, and it ended up falling through. That’s a whole different story!)
There ended up being quite a bit of drama with the closing, not because of our buyers who are fantastic, but because of the appraiser and the bank. Anyway, it eventually worked out, and now a really lovely family is living in our house and eating tomatoes from our garden!
Anyway, we moved all the furniture out on a Saturday and the apartment became home. However, we didn’t really appreciate that Friday night was our LAST NIGHT in our old house, so we went back with sleeping bags and spent the night again so we could really mark the occasion!
I miss my hydrangea bush!
One last picture with the hydrangeas!
One last game of Statues! Boy statues are SO different from girl statues!
One last cookout!
One last night in the house!
Oh, it was bittersweet to leave that house! So many memories there! It was our very first house! Jim and I had been there for TEN YEARS! The babies came home to that house. It’s that only home they’ve ever known!
That house will always hold a special place in our hearts! We are delighted that it is now home to a wonderful new family and hope they love it as much as we did!
Don’t worry. We never actually call him that!
Some of you may have noticed in this summer whirlwind of posts that at some point, Zachary started wearing glasses!
At his 5-year checkup last summer, he struggled to read the eye chart, so we took him to a pediatric eye dr to have a full eye exam.
The dr discovered that Zachary was not really using his left eye. He was only using the right one. The left eye was weakening and beginning to turn in. Yikes! So Zachary got a special pair of glasses to force him to use both of his eyes.
I wish I could recreate some of the tests here for you. It was a really fascinating exam. There was one test where the dr showed Zachary four little dots of light and asked him to count them. He only saw three! Because he wasn’t using his left eye at all, he couldn’t see the fourth one! Fascinating!
It was hard on him at first because he actually saw worse with the glasses on than he did without them! Luckily, that didn’t last long! His eyes adjusted pretty quickly. He wears them all day every day, and his vision has improved greatly over the past year.
If the glasses had not improved his eyes, we would have had to additionally have him wear a patch over his good eye until his weak one caught up. Happily, we don’t have to do that!
He’ll probably have to wear the glasses several more years, kind of like a retainer for his eyes. We’ll see!
AND here are a few more pics from my phone! These are from 2011.
Yea! Face painting at Spring Celebration!
Easter clothes retake
Fancy hair!
What a face! I’m pretty sure we posed this face on purpose to send the picture to Daddy!
Shark teeth! Reagan’s first permanent tooth came in before she lost the baby one!
The Thanksgiving victim
The Thanksgiving culprit! Yummy!
So I figured out today how to get pictures off my phone and onto the computer. Don’t judge me.
Here’s some gems from 2010.
I SAID DON’T JUDGE ME!
With Kinley and Kallen at the Oak Ridge Children’s Museum
We love Daddy!
We’re in a box!
First visit to the dentist, I think!
Donuts at Krispy Kreme…not the same day as the dentist!
Jonathan, enjoying Carter’s tunnel
At the dr.’s office. Someone must have had strep or something. They don’t normally get popsicles!
At the emergency room at Children’s, when Jonathan fell and hit his head on the coffee table, thus requiring stitches.
Don’t fail to notice all the blood drops on the back of his shirt! If you missed out on that story the first time, go check it out now! It’s a good one!
Aww, so tired!
Hope you enjoyed them!
In April of 2011, Reagan won second place in a coloring contest, much to Jonathan’s dismay since he felt his coloring job had been just a good, if not better, than his sister’s!
Well, this year, Jonathan received the artistic attention he deserved when a piece of his artwork from school was chosen to hang in the Community Room at the Knoxville Museum of Art. That’s right! The MUSEUM!
We all made a special trip to go see it!
(Well, actually we made TWO special trips because we were told the incorrect dates of the picture’s display. We arrived at the museum all excited and asked where the school artwork was displayed and were told it had already been taken down, three months ago! We were very confused and disappointed. Luckily that was the same day as Carter’s birthday party, so we had that to distract us from our disappointment, and it all worked out in the end!)
The Knoxville Museum of Art
Admission is free to the public!
The middle vertical row of four paintings is the kindergartener’s row. Jonathan’s is the predominantly red one. Their theme was primary colors, and you can easily see that Jonathan’s is distinctly different from the other kids’. Maybe that’s why they chose it.
Jonathan said it’s a picture of a mobile. He told me he used red because most of the other kids were using lots of blue and yellow and they were running out of those colors. That sounds like him!
The artist with his work
