Finding Peace

Sweet bean, what a beautiful thing summer vacation with you is. Your Mommy likes the heat, and you like being outdoors, and combined, we get to spend a whole summer outside, playing in the forest, rivers, lakes, puttering in the garden and in your fairy garden...life is beautiful always, but especially in the summertime. Our goal for you this summer was to get you into swimming lessons, as you hadn't done any since you were about 2, and it was time! For your first set of lessons (2 weeks) at Ferny Coombe, you had a wonderful, wonderful teacher who had patience but also pushed you gently. You had a wonderful first couple of days, and then a very difficult 5 days or so. For many lessons, each time you were asked to do something you would say, "I don't want to do that" or "I don't want to go under the water," etc, etc. For one lesson, your Mommy even had to pull you gently out from behind me and towards your teacher, and once you were in the water you ...

Sweet Riley, darling boy, what a love you are. When I was pregnant and we found out that we were having a boy, I have to admit that I was nervous that I wouldn't know how to love a little boy right; as though there was some different way to love a little boy, and I wouldn't know how to do it. Darling boy, I was wrong. I could not even have imagined a love like we have. Not a greater love than the one we have with your sister, but an undescribable one nonetheless. Darling boy, I missed writing about you when you were 7 months old, but boy have you been changing! At 6.5 months, you learned how to sit up by yourself, with only a tumble or two here and there. When we are in the car you sit so that when Mommy or Daddy turn around you can turn around and see us, and give us that sweet smile. Your sister likes to sit right in the middle beside you, and if we put her car seat back in the car, and accidentally put it on the other side, she gets upset that shes not close enough to...