September Highlights:
- Kids start school
- Luke and I go to Adventure Guides camp at Sequoia Lake and Luke wins an award for catching the biggest fish
- Lilah starts fall vollyeball
- Luke starts fall baseball and YMCA basketball
- Lilah gets first babysitting assignment
- I am making great progress in my recovery – back to doing all the activities I was doing before without any major discomfort!
Kids School/Activities
I could tell getting a picture of Lilah on the first day of school was going to be difficult this year. She is starting to develop that teenage self-consciousness bug — the one that allows for pictures to be taken in private, but not out in public where all her friends can see. Nonetheless I remained undeterred and brought my camera with me as Cathy and I walked the kids up to their school on the first day. Lilah kept giving me mean looks and whispering “no pictures” as we walked up to her school. I told her I would take the picture fast so not to worry. In the end she agreed to have her picture taken, but there was definitely no smiling. Luke does not have that issue yet, but I’m sure the time will come for him as well.
Despite the complaints about having to start school so soon after our Kauai vacation (the next day after getting back to be exact), both kids seemed to have adjusted well, which basically means they are keeping up with their assignments and diligently completing their homework. Lilah has always been good about finishing her homework and all things related to school, something she reminded me of when she handed me her latest certificate for being on the Gold Honor Roll list (for maintaining a 4.0 GPA), but Luke has never had that same sense of responsibility when it comes to school. This year, however, he is really into completing his homework as fast as he can so that he can have his “own time” to play his favorite video game, Minecraft. I sometimes worry about Luke playing Minecraft too much, but the the reality is that he gets to play it for maybe an hour or two tops (daily) because he knows he must get his homework done first.
In addition, I signed Luke up for fall baseball and YMCA basketball. That may sound like a lot, but they are very low key leagues. Baseball has no mandatory practices and only one game a week, and basketball has one practice and one game. Lilah is also a fan of low-key sports. She is currently playing volleyball which consists of one practice and one game per week.
She may not want sports taking up too much of her time, but my daughter is pretty industrious and always on the lookout for ways to earn more money, so when the opportunity came to babysit two-year old Calan for a couple hours while our friends went out for a date night, she jumped on it. It was a pretty easy first babysitting gig since our friends put Calan to sleep shortly after Lilah arrived at their house. Lilah’s responsibility was to keep an ear tuned to the baby monitor just in case he got up. It turned out to be an uneventful night in that department so Lilah used the time to watch her latest favorite show, Love It or List It, which is a show in which an interior designer and a real estate agent compete for the attention of two homeowners. Typically the homeowners are a husband and wife who feel they have outgrown their current home and are looking for something new. The interior designer is then given the challenge to redesign the home in a way that would suit the couple’s needs, while the real estate agent looks for houses on the market that might also satisfy their requirements. Once the designer finishes her redesign, and the agent has shown his houses, the couple is left with one question at the end of the show: are you going to love it or list it? Love it, means the couple love their remodeled home and have decided to stay there. List it means the couple wants to list their existing home for sale and move to one of the homes shown to them by the agent. Lilah can’t get enough of this show and says she is now interested in being an interior designer. She has already decided that her first project will be her bedroom. Looking forward to that, but probably not until the summer because Lilah wants to do it when she has a big block of time – no rushing (I have no issues with that ;-)).
Adventure Guides Camp at Sequoia Lake
I briefly contemplated not going to the Adventure Guides camp this year because it was only a little more than a week after getting back from our summer vacation. I thought Luke might not want to go so soon after getting back from vacation, but he said going would be fun so we decided to go.
The drive to Sequoia Lake was going well. It looked like we had maybe less than an hour or so to go, but that’s before we hit the 220 highway. Never take the 220 highway (a route I ended up taking thanks to Google maps). It is a windy, snaking road that goes on and on for 25 miles or so. The type of road that never allows you to go more than 25 mph at a time and moves you from side to side every few seconds. About half way up the road Luke turned to me and said he was starting to wish he hadn’t decided to go to camp. I told him I was feeling the same way. We stopped a couple of times just to get our bearings and stop the dizziness. We basically added another hour to our trip by taking this route (5 hours total). The only bright part about this story is the dramatic contrast in emotion we felt upon arriving at camp. We had never been so relieved to get out of a car and be done with driving. And we did not get back in the car again until it was time to leave.
Other than being out in nature, the beautiful 80 degree weather, and the chance to hangout with Luke, the highlight of this trip was Luke winning an award for catching the biggest fish. Before he caught the fish, I had caught a Blue Gill on my own and showed it to him. We then took out a boat for 2 hours and he caught his own Blue Gill as well. From then on, all he wanted to do was fish. He also wanted to participate in the fishing competition, which meant getting on another boat. Since I was still recovering from my clavicle injury, I opted to sit out the boat ride and let Luke go out fishing with one of the other dads. That was good for my recovery, but not good in that I did not get to see the fish Luke caught. I did however get to hear him screaming in delight at hauling in a 14-inch bass, and, this time, that was good enough.
In the evening, he received an award for his efforts at the campfire and decided he was glad he had come to camp after all.
More next month…