September already

September already! This summer has just whizzed by. We've had so much fun with our two trips and playing with friends. I'm a little sad to see that the school year is once again upon us, especially since so many of our friends are starting kindergarten this year and will be in school every day.

I'm trying to look on the bright side of school starting, though. Jack will be going to his preschool three days a week for four hours a day this year. I'm hopeful this will give me a nice solid chunk of time to do things with just Violet. So much of our activities revolve around Jack and his friends. It will be nice to have something that is just for her, especially now that she's getting old enough to really interact with me.

It will also be nice to get Jack into a routine of taking direction from other adults. I think any structure that we can add into his life is helpful, and he thrived so much at school last year. He is getting so very close to reading, and I'm optimistic that preschool will give him the added incentive to really make an effort to get it.

Aside from our Alaska trip, we've been keeping ourselves really busy in August. Jack completed a second session of swim class, and I'm so proud to say that I have a bona fide swimmer on my hands. He actually put his face in, kicked, and swam with big arm strokes in the swimming pool. He is still a little nervous to try to swim across the pool - they didn't quite master breathing techniques yet - but the progress he has made from the beginning of the summer when he vowed that he was NEVER going to learn how to swim is just awesome.

This summer, Jack also discovered the joys of bowling. There is a cool summer program called Kids Bowl Free that allows kids to bowl two games a day for free every in the summer. We have been going quite a bit, because Jack just loves it. It helps, of course, that the bowling alley puts bumpers up so that he never gutters and that they also have a ramp for him to push the ball down. He hasn't shown much interest in actually bowling the way you're supposed to. It's obvious that the main attraction is all the numbers involved.

But he loves bowling in any form. He asks to play bowling games on the computer. His friend has a bowling game on his Wii. Jack really loves this one, because it has the option to exponentially add more and more pins. He draws bowling games on paper and pretends to knock pins down with his pin. We just today got a little plastic bowling set in the mail, and he's in heaven.

The other sport that Jack has discovered is golf. Tom took him to a driving range last week, and they hit a bucket of balls ("The birdie bucket," Jack informed me, "which has 80 balls"). He had a blast. I'm going to take him mini-golfing this upcoming week. The only difficulty I foresee is that golf obviously is scored in such a way that the lowest score wins. That's not something my numbers-obsessed boy either understands or appreciates.

Jack's main challenges are, as always, impulse and temper control. When he is upset or unhappy about something, he still hasn't mastered how to 1) hide it and 2) get over it quickly. He is also susceptible to the influences of friends who sometimes don't make the best choices. For now, this typically only manifests itself in the use of potty talk and rambunctious behavior. While this is annoying, the behavior that upsets me most is when he is unkind to others, whether by engaging in exclusionary play or by saying mean words in a nasty tone. Thankfully, this doesn't happen very often, but he still doesn't seem to completely grasp the concept behind the Golden Rule. For someone who can be so easily upset by others, it sometimes frustrates me that he doesn't understand how others can be upset by him. Overall, though, he is a happy kid who wants to like everyone and everything.

One of our current favorite things is to have "Mommy and Jack-Jack one on one time." This has become more and more important as Violet has become increasingly mobile and vocal. I try to make a concerted effort to play at least one game a day with him, although most of his "games" have convoluted rules that somehow always result in Jack winning. My favorite thing is just to have him sit on my lap and cuddle.

He tells me almost every day, "I love you the most, Mommy."

He sometimes asks me, "Do you think I love you more than you love me?" I tell him I don't see how it's possible. But he insists that he does love me more.

And then he says, "I love you double more than I did yesterday. And I will love you double more tomorrow. And it will never stop."