I was so proud of Julia who rode the bumblebee ride at Dollywood all by herself.

Photos take a lot of different forms at our house. Other than the blog I am trying to keep up-to-date scrapbooks with the things we do with the girls. While I’m about a year behind, I have made some significant ground in the last two weeks. Other projects demand that I put this project up for a little while. This is something I do when the kids are sleeping, so Emily started asking every morning what new pictures did I have to show her. Before I put the girls books away I snapped a photo of the albums. The top two albums represent my hard work of the last two weeks, but the stack has the collection of my girls lives. I loved showing the books to the girls and telling them about the things we have done. I might need a new shelf soon.

With summer come the end of all our normal weekly activities. Last week was the end of three of these activities. Our swim class, Thursday school, and Bible Study Fellowship. We have a few more weeks of Little Gym before the spring classes end.

The swim class was only eight weeks long, but it was a fun eight weeks. We splashed, swam, and bobbed our way through them. I was so proud of Emily and her interest in swimming. She enjoyed her teacher, liked to preform for her, and was getting a sense of being in the water under her own steam. Julia still wasn’t “fearful” of the water so it was fun to do things without her clinging to me. She didn’t like to float on her back, but enjoyed most of the other activities. She would “swim” between the teacher and her Mama, practice her crab walk along the pool edge, swim to a ball she would throw out in the water, and sing motion songs with the class. We are planning on both girls to take the fall version of the class again.

Thursday School was both for Emily and Julia. The class gave Emily the opportunity to learn to play with others along with learning life lessons. It also gave Julia some special Mama time. We would go to Mother Goose together, shop, eat breakfast, play, and see our friend Maeve.

Bible Study Fellowship was an opportunity for all of us to have some constructive time of learning. Mama enjoyed her study of scripture, Emily loved spending the morning with her class and striving to be the class leader, and Julia played her morning away with other toddlers and snacks. Out of all our activities this one was the most regimented. I could see such growth in Emily with her group participation and living up to high expectations. What a joy! After class we would walk a special sidewalk out to our car. Emily kept wanting to walk further on the sidewalk, so I started parking at the end of the sidewalk so that she could enjoy walking the whole way.

There are so many fun activities to fill our summer with, but this week will feel a little empty without the activities that have come to define our week. Emily typically asks each day where we are going or what we are doing. We will just have to enjoy each day and what fun activity comes with each one.

Mommy is a train person, Grandpa is a train person, Daddy sure likes to build track, and we are starting early to create little train girls. This year the girls started their Thomas the Train collection. There has been a layed out track everyday since Christmas with engines running around it.

Robby was chomping at the bit to build track layouts with all of the track, but we thought it would be best to wait for Emily to get used to the toy with just the starter set. Emily has enjoyed talking to the engines and quickly wanted to name the engines that didn’t come with names. She hasn’t mastered all of the rules of trains, like she thinks they can make turns and double back at switches. It is really cute.

After a few days of the simple layout Robby has started building larger track layouts that take up almost the whole floor. Amazingly the girls play with it for a while before destroying it and when it is destroyed it is always Julia’s work. Julia has been imitating the rest of us by running the engines around the track some too. This is going to be one fun toy for a while!

Every one plays silly games with themselves and others, but when the games are one year-old games, they are so much fun. Julia has a few of them she plays with us:

• Pickup – The old traditional game of dumping things on the floor so that someone else will pick it up. We don’t play this long, but I’m enjoying the fact that she understands dimensions and distances. It is almost like playing peek-a-boo with your toys.
• Peek-a-boo- Julia doesn’t initiate this game much with us, but when we play it with her she just gives a huge smile and giggles the longer we play.
• Puzzles- Julia loves to take puzzles apart. She bangs the pieces together, she looks at them, and she chews on them. In our number puzzle she always pulls out the 1 and 7 and chews on them. Maybe they will be her lucky numbers. Emily and I put together a lot of puzzles from Julia’s playing with them.
• Clear the Table or Tray – When Julia is finished eating, she picks up her food and throws it off of her tray. It is like she is cleaning up. She also clears off toys from table tops, couches, ottoman, and end tables. If she can reach it, it is likely to hit the floor. We will have to wait and see if she dislikes clutter later.
• Stack – Julia likes to try to stack things into towers. She isn’t very good at making the stack big, but enjoys it a lot. I should say the corollary to this is that she likes to knock down the towers too. This is a fact that drives Emily crazy and gets Emily to tell Julia ‘NO Baby’.
• Fill up – If she can find a container or hollow block she enjoys putting smaller things into them.
• Pull the books down – She is tall enough when standing to reach our kid books. She enjoys pulling the ones she can reach to the floor. Then she sits down and goes through the pile looking at the books and the things on the different pages
• Bring you books to read- Lately she has added bringing us books to read to her. She has her favorites – a counting to 10 ladybug book (favorite because of the holes on the pages you can stick your fingers into to turn the pages), a Dora magic wand book, and a Dora Halloween book. Most likely the book she will bring you will be one of these books.
• Runs when she gets freedom – She doesn’t have much freedom to move around the house so when she gets it she goes for it. I was picking up some things and taking them back to their appropriate rooms. Julia kept crawling around the house at first following me, but it ended up being a game of crawling around the circle in our house over and over again.
• Play with whatever sister is playing with – Julia’s favorite toy is Emily. Later, she will figure out that she is her playmate, but right now she is just someone to follow around and mimic. She loves to try to play with whatever Emily is playing with. Too cute.
• Blanket – Julia loves her blankets. This is completely my fault and I love it. Now when I go to get her in the morning she stands at the crib side holding her blanket like she is saying ‘I’m ready Mommy!’. When it is bedtime I just wrap her in her blanket and she physically relaxes. It is like her friend. Blankets make good friends.
• Naptime dash from the room – Julia likes to go down for a nap or bed awake and go on to sleep by herself. This makes putting her down fast. Some days she doesn’t think she is ready for a nap she will stand up in her bed and look for me, I always try to get out of the room before she can see me. She just seems to settle down faster, if she doesn’t see me. But she is moving faster these days, so I have to move fast to get out of the room, too.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about appreciating what we have while we still have it and the lessons we learn only through experience. So this Father’s Day, instead of finding a card with someone else’s words in it I’m writing my own.

If you haven’t guessed already, the little girl sitting on the table is me at an age between my girls’ current ages. What my dad thought of me at that point I will never know. The hopes and dreams he had for me are not thoughts that he chose to share with me when he had the memory of them. But, my knowing what he thought doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I’m grateful for the time that he has spent with me. If that time was letting me sit on the table at Mom’s birthday party or sitting in my car as I ran errands with he and my girls – I’m grateful for the time. My fondest memories are times that I spent with my family!

This Father’s Day, I want to wish my dad a Happy Fathers Day and thank him for the time that he chose to invest in our family. It was a wise and valuable investment.