Labor Day Vacation

We spent Labor Day weekend up at camp. What fun! Didn't rain until Monday, so we were able to spend an afternoon at the state-park beach on Sat. Sunday I took Sam on a kayak ride to the Black Lagoon. For those not familiar with it, it's a little inlet hidden inside another inlet, near the state park. The local kids like to decorate it with Hallowe'eny things.

There was a coffin, a big skeleton hanging from a tree, two ham bones hanging from strings (?), several rocks painted with day-glow colors and labeled "the eyes of the lagoon" and a number of spooky signs. We learned from someone Susan knows whose husband grew up not too far from there that this has been a tradition for at least on generation. I remember seeing it when I was in high school, and it reaches back before that.

Sam loved it, and asked to go around it a couple of times.

Also saw eight turtles in the Black Lagoon. So there.

Josh has started on rice cereal! For a long time he's appeared to watch us enviously while we eat solids, and now he's had a taste of the good life, and as Susan said, we've found one of his strengths!

He's also been quite happy bouncing up and down in the exer-saucer. Not crawling yet, but I am sure he's working on that. Josh absolutely loved looking at the water and the trees from the deck. On Sunday morning thunderstorms rumbled by on either side of us, giving us dark clouds and high winds but little actual rain. Josh and I stood out on the deck, and he was captivated by the meteorological drama.

The weekend included a fair amount of laying about as well (see photo). Sam had a fever for six days, sometimes quite high. This was hand-foot-mouth virus, which I keep thinking of as hoof-and-mouth disease, which it isn't. Poor guy was home and isolated for a long time. When he finally licked it, it was a relief to all.

For two weeks before Sam got sick he went each morning to a pottery class at the Art Gallery. He had a great time and produced some really neat stuff. While he was in class each morning Susan hung out in the gallery Atrium with a laptop and sometimes with Josh.

One last Samecdote: The other day Sam told Susan he could think faster than he could talk. (I am not sure he's aware this is untrue of many people, including teenagers and politicians.) Anyway, he immediately demonstrated it by saying "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" five times fast, and then standing, silently, looking intently at nothing, while he did the same thing in his head, even faster.

Five year olds are fun.

He started school, btw. First grade! A very smooth transition, so far. When asked yesterday what's different from kindergarten he told us about "math minutes", where you go through as many math problems as you can in a particular number of minutes. He was very proud to tell us that he was the only one in the class who didn't get any wrong--and he's the youngest! Of course, the older kids have multiplication and division and he just had addition, but it was a nice boost, and well done.