Princess Elle

I think our theme as of the past week and a half has been: so much to do, no time to do it!  Patrick began his 3 week string of meets this past weekend.  Meanwhile, he has been working on entries for the meet this coming weekend, registering swimmers for the meet in 2 weeks, and preparing for end-of-season tasks among other things.  For Wildernorm he and his business partner are working on finishing up a brochure for an art center in Ohio.  Sarah had her last class of the semester on Monday.  Fall semester will start in just a few weeks and then it will be her time to be crazy busy between class, practicum, work, and finishing all of that by 3:30 every day so that she can pick up the kids before Patrick has practice.  We are already preparing ourselves for this being a very, very hectic year.  

Elle had her final tumbling session last week.  It was parent observation day, but with two tumbling classes going on simultaneously, there were so many parents that we could only observe from outside the room.  At the end of the class certificates were handed out.  Elle was so excited to stand up and receive her certificate.  Also, Elle made a funny comment during her tumbling class.  Each time she's there, the teacher gives the class a break half-way through the class time and lets the kids go get a drink of water.  While standing in line I heard one little kid say, "I love ... (I can't remember what now)."  Another little kid said, "I love my mommy."  Elle chimed in and said, "I love princess hair!"  Oh good grief. 

I don't know how Elle became so infatuated with the Disney princesses.  Over the weekend when I offered to do Elle's hair and said I could curl it, put it in a pony tail, or braid it, she said she wanted "mermaid hair."  I think I ended up curling it for her.  And last night Elle said at the dinner table, "I'm not Elle, I'm Princess Elle."  I think Patrick said something to the effect that she probably wouldn't want to be known as "Princess Elle."

There isn't much new to report on Jay.  His hair has been getting long and falling over his ears, so Sarah trimmed the spots above his ears.  It's not perfect, but now he doesn't have wings any more.  We have arranged for Jay to go to daycare where Elle has been going for the past year.  He will go during the time that Elle is in preschool starting in September.  I think he'll be excited to go as whenever I take him in the house and he sees all the kids and toys, he always wants to join in the fun and play.  

I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago Patrick and the Aquahawk team participated in the World's Largest Community Workout.  There is a person (who I believe is a former high school coach) who used to lead dog-day workouts for his football team in the summers (starting in the early 80's) for those athletes who wanted to stay in shape.  It later changed into a community workout (called the Red Dog Days) and for quite some time now he has been leading summer workouts for Lawrence residents twice a day M-Th during the summer.  There is always a good number of people who attend, so they decided to see if they could break the Guinness Book of World Records for how many people participated in a community workout.  I think they were hoping that 1,500 - 2,000 people would attend, but it turns out that over 2,750 people worked out that day.  

One last thing to note- I saw a butterfly visiting our butterfly garden the other day, and snapped a few pictures, which I will include.  We also found a caterpillar and put it near our butterfly garden.