-Spending time with family.  Yesterday we had lunch with David’s family and today we had lunch with my family. I love that we finally live close enough for that to be a fairly typical weekend!

-Taking long bicycle rides! Now that the kids are in school I’ll actually get to go biking more often, I am so excited!  I went for a bike ride on Friday, another on Saturday, and if its not too rainy tomorrow, I’m going to go for another ride then – I might even try mountain biking again! Hopefully now that I’ll be able to go the gym, do my HIIT workout, and/or go for a bike ride every day I’ll loose the weight I gained this summer not being able to work out regularly and eating too much food in NYC!

-Spending time outdoors. I don’t like being cooped up inside during so much of the winter (like last year) and so I’ve been really enjoying taking runs in the morning with my dog, Lily, each day after the school bus leaves. Isn’t she sweet looking? I can’t believe she was a tiny little 16 lb puppy when we got her last year and now she’s over 50 lbs! For anyone who doesn’t know, she’s a beagle/golden retriever mix and I think they are just the sweetest dogs ever! She’s very patient with the kids – they can pull on her, sit on her, play with her and she never gets annoyed with them. She’s also very protective of them and will growl/lunge/bark at any stranger who reaches for them, as we found when hiking and a lady tried to help Ellie off of a rock. She not too big to be an indoor dog, but still big enough to intimidate people when needed.  (Though she’s so sweet that she rarely is intimidating.)

I also like being able to take long walks on our country road with the kids, heading down to the church at the end of our road to play on their playground. The kids like to walk through the cemetery on the way there.

This morning we put Ellie on the bus for her first day of preschool in public school, and Killian for his first day of First Grade.  Both kids were happy and excited!  Sadly, not as excited as I was, I think… I hate to be that mom who looks forward to her kids being in school all day, but after the last few months of David being out of town and me being home with the kids 24-7 I am happy to get back into a routine and have some time to take care of stuff on my own!  I feel like I’ve hardly gotten to enjoy the kids this summer since I’ve had to be multi-tasking all the time – I’m always working on laundry, dishes, cleaning, accounting, making doctor’s appointments, taking care of the Etsy shop, etc because I’ve had no time to do those things without my kids.  Now that they’re in school I can take care of all that stuff during the day and just enjoy time with them from when they get off the bus till bedtime.  Plus, I’m happy to get back to my part-time job – I really love it and find it fulfilling and I only got to go to my office a few times this summer.  Arranging childcare is so hard!  We live near family, but my parents and sister both work, David’s father works, and David’s mother had a lot of plans already for the summer and so I ended up staying home from work some days – which adds up when you only work one day a week during the summer!  But now, I don’t have to worry about childcare while I work three days a week – whew!  And on Mondays and Fridays every week I don’t have to work and the kids are in school – so I’ll actually get to do fun stuff like go shopping, go bike-riding, see movies no one else wants to see with me… I’m so excited – I feel like I’m suddenly free to be “Jen” again instead of only being “Mom.” I hope that doesn’t sound too selfish… Today I took Lily for a run after the kids got on the bus, went to work, went to the gym, got groceries, and now I’m about to do some cleaning before meeting the kids as they get off the bus. Then we’ll head into town for music lessons and then come home to a lovely Mexican dinner – I have spicy black beans in the crockpot and I’m going to make homemade tortillas to accompany them. YUM!

Update: The kids got off the bus and they both had a great time!  Ellie immediately said, “IT WAS GREAT!”

I told the kids we’d do something special this week since they are going back to school already – so today we all got haircuts, went to Chuck E. Cheese’s (where an adult can loose their mind!), t0 Bubblecake, and then to the kids’ school’s open house.

First, the haircuts! Ellie has been asking for short hair for a couple months, she said she wanted hair as short as mine but I told her that wouldn’t work for her hair (too curly).  I liked her hair long, but she wanted it short and I think she should get to pick how her hair looks, of course. She is thrilled with it!  Killian, Erin, and I all got haircuts, too… but Ellie’s was the biggest difference! Here she is with her new do:

Doesn’t she look adorable?

Afterward we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s – ugh. I don’t like that place, but the kids sure love it.  Luckily Auntie came because it would have been a nightmare trying to keep track of two kids – it was packed in there.

After that, we went to an amazing little cupcake shop in Roanoke – everything was declicious!

(I convinced Erin to get her hair cut, too! Doesn’t it look great?)

Finally, we went to the open house so the kids could meet their teachers for this year.  I think they’ll both have a wonderful time!  We let them play on the playground for a little while afterwards, and got some great pictures – I am LOVING our new camera!

The kids start school this Thursday, so last week was our last full week of summer vacation and we spent it in NYC with David.  It was wonderful! During the week we visited: the American Museum of Natural History, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Long Island Children’s Museum, and then on Friday we were going to go to the NY Aquarium but the kids asked to go to the Staten Island Children’s Museum instead.  We had so much fun everywhere we went! Here’s a few highlights, you can see all the pictures in the gallery.

Me and Ellie with a GIANT piece of Topaz, which is our birthstone:

Building a miniature Great Wall of China at the CMoB:

Holding really tiny hermit crabs:

The LICM was a huge pain to get to – 2.5 hours on public transportation (subway, train, bus) – but it was amazing! The kids favorite activities there were the Pirate School show, the climbing tower, and the bubble center:

It has been wonderful getting to spend so much time in NYC this summer, we got to try so many different kinds of foods, go to so many museums/aquariums/zoos, and I was really happy for the kids to spend time somewhere so radically different from our home in Floyd.  Personally, I like Floyd better overall – but NYC is great to visit!  The kids are now total pros at riding the subway, and are even more open to trying new foods.

Here we are on the Staten Island Ferry, and NO I am not wearing a fanny pack – that’s the backpack I carry Ellie in fastened around my waist.

I love this, if only we could have fit another backpack on somewhere…

The kids start school this Thursday, so last week was our last full week of summer vacation and we spent it in NYC with David.  It was wonderful! During the week we visited: the American Museum of Natural History, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Long Island Children’s Museum, and then on Friday we were going to go to the NY Aquarium but the kids asked to go to the Staten Island Children’s Museum instead.  We had so much fun everywhere we went! Here’s a few highlights, you can see all the pictures in the gallery.

Me and Ellie with a GIANT piece of Topaz, which is our birthstone:

Building a miniature Great Wall of China at the CMoB:

Holding really tiny hermit crabs:

The LICM was a huge pain to get to – 2.5 hours on public transportation (subway, train, bus) – but it was amazing! The kids favorite activities there were the Pirate School show, the climbing tower, and the bubble center:

It has been wonderful getting to spend so much time in NYC this summer, we got to try so many different kinds of foods, go to so many museums/aquariums/zoos, and I was really happy for the kids to spend time somewhere so radically different from our home in Floyd.  Personally, I like Floyd better overall – but NYC is great to visit!  The kids are now total pros at riding the subway, and are even more open to trying new foods.

Here we are on the Staten Island Ferry, and NO I am not wearing a fanny pack – that’s the backpack I carry Ellie in fastened around my waist.

I love this, if only we could have fit another backpack on somewhere…

So, the good news is that we had another wonderful trip to NYC and then a great quickie trip to Richmond. Here’s a couple highlights, and you can see all the pictures here:

The kids absolute favorite part of our most recent trip? Donut Plant!

And here’s the kids in front of Westhampton Lake at the University of Richmond:

The bad news is that Ellie re-broke her arm yesterday.  She took a fall out of a toy car at a friend’s house last night, started complaining about her arm in the middle of the night, and we took her to the doctor (again) this morning.  X-rays confirmed that she re-broke one of the bones in her arm so she’ll be in this cast for at least 6 weeks.

I loved the Bronx Zoo!  We went halfway through the week and even though I had been really enjoying the city, as soon as we entered the zoo park I felt instantly at home – trees, grass, flowers, animals… It was wonderful!  The kids had a great time, too, even though it was an exhausting day.

The kids like the building full of birds the best, and Ellie was just so cute exploring everything:

In fact, the zoo was so big and required so much walking that Killian was tired enough that he got in the backpack for awhile!    The kids also really enjoyed the ride on the monorail:

You can see the rest of the pictures in the gallery!