Saying Goodbye to Summer

As the last few days of the summer start to come to a close, we are trying to hold onto what bit of time we can together enjoying the beach and preparing for the year ahead.  While the summer is always such a great time for us, we are also looking forward to the routines and structure that lie ahead for all of us.  

As it has been evident on the blog, the last few weeks of August have been hectic to say the least.  Generally, both are doing pretty well with the potty and I am particularly happy with the progress we have made with Colin.  Just the other day I was feeling discouraged because although he was staying pretty dry, I didn't feel as though he were telling me.  However, that has improved and I would now say that about 75% of the times he goes in a day he tells us he has to go.  Kailey has regressed a bit and is having more accidents in a day, but I am hoping that will change once she gets to school.  I am pretty confident it's a control issue for her.  

Although it was a very harried time, I am grateful I took the approach that I did.  Because I spent so much time following Colin around and watching his every  move, I was more observant to some of the things he has improved upon over the course of the summer.  The clarity of his words and the ones he's stringing together are significantly improving which has been fun to watch.  We are able to have better conversations with Colin and notice that him and Kailey seem to completely understand each other (even when we aren't sure what he's trying to say).  

I was also pleasantly surprised the other day to walk in the family room and see Colin appropriately playing with blocks.  This may seem like such a small feat, but Colin often gets frustrated with toys like blocks and will throw them or dump the bin and move on.  The amount of time he spent working with them was quite significant as well!

I took the kids for back to school hair cuts the other day.  Kailey absolutely loves the attention she gets when her hair is being combed and then cut and was excited to show it off to anyone who asked.  Colin had some difficulties tolerating the buzzer this time around, but it was more because his hair was probably the longest it's been yet so the actual buzzing lasted for a longer period of time.  

Colin has been a very typical older sibling these days in the ways that he is taunting Kailey lately.  He will deliberately take the things she has been playing with and smile at her knowing he is going to get a response (and boy does he!).  With the amount of times this has been happening lately, it's nice to see moments like this where they are choosing to be close and hang out together.  

Kailey has been picking up phones lately and attempting to take pictures.  I didn't realize that she had actually taken a slew of them on my phone the other day until I was transferring pictures over for my blog post.  She must have actually asked Colin to say "cheese" for the first one.  

I remember saying cheese to her, but didn't realize she was actually taking pictures.  

Even her baby got a few shots taken of her.

I had to laugh to realize she took quite a few of the toilet bowl as well...

I will be quite honest when I say that I am actually looking forward to school starting for all of us next week.  We have some good moments, but then lots of moments like this lately...

Now that Kailey is pretty close to potty trained, we wanted to convert her crib into a toddler bed so that she would have some more freedom in the morning to get out of bed (instead of screaming from it) when it was time to go to the bathroom.  The funny thing is that she still stands in it and screams as though she can't get out.  She keeps telling us that it's broken and needs the strings (ie, the front of the crib) to fix it.  

So, we'll continue to enjoy the rest of this holiday weekend and the little bit of summer it has left to give us, but then we will definitely head into this school year ready to see what kinds of big things it has in store for all of us.  

So long, sweet summer...