Summer 2008: June, July, August


Lily hit the 30-pound weight that allows her to ride in a much cooler car seat. It may come as a shock to most adults, but there was a time in our lives when gaining weight was a very good thing!


We still go to the park some evenings or weekends, and Lily still loves the swings. She also spends a lot of time walking back and forth in a rock path at the park and complains that Swiper the Fox is swiping her things. (That's a Dora the Explorer reference, for those of you with grown kids or no kids.)


In June Lily started drawing people a lot in her pictures. She draws a big circle with eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and then draws arms and legs (coming out of the face!), and last draws some hair on top.


Michelle had a luau party at work, and got people to pose for goofy pictures!


We gave into temptation and bought a new flat-screen TV! First we bought a 42" one, but after bringing it home, realized that there were still a few unused inches on either side, and we couldn't have that. So we took it back and got a 47" one!


We had a Fourth of July party at our house with the Willises and Peughs, and Lily and Madeline wore cute dresses and played together.


Here they are playing in the ball pit.


Susan Peugh made a great Independence Day cake, and we blew up some fireworks outside when it got dark. Most of them were small showers of sparks, but we saved a big one for the end that shot things way up into the sky. It was so cool we're going to buy a bunch of those next year.


Lily's gotten good at writing her name this summer. (Good thing we gave her a short name!) The L-I-L part was easy, though she had to get the order right (first she would spell it L-L-I). Then she kept making a Y that looked more like a T on the top, but we told her to make the top parts point up, and after a lot of tries she made good Y's. She could also write Dad!


Here's a video of her writing her name (AVI format, 12 MB). Click to view it, or download here.



Here are some of Lily's outfits this summer. She loves to wear dresses, because you have to wear a dress to be a princess (she tells me), and you also have to wear princess shoes. In the last picture she's making a mad face for some reason.


We had never taken a family vacation since Lily was born (other than visiting grandparents), so we took our first one this summer. We drove to St. Louis and went to Six Flags. Here's Lily on some of the rides.


Most of the time she just wanted to play on the playground at Six Flags.


Some characters Lily recognizes were there, but she wouldn't stand close enough to them to take a picture! Poombah was just a ride, so she was willing to sit on him.


The only big walking character she would get close to was Foghorn Leghorn. This is because of a Looney Tunes episode she loves where a chicken hawk calls Foghorn Leghorn a "loud-mouthed schnuck". This phrase cracks her up and she repeats it a lot. So here she is telling some innocent guy in a costume that he's a loud-mouthed schnuck!


Another place we went to in St. Louis was their Children's Museum. We were trying to find the address, and it was this very residential-looking building with construction going on around it. It doesn't look anything like what we expected.


Inside the museum there were lots of fun things to play with.


Lily had more fun outside the museum, where they have a big sand area, with a huge sand castle and plenty of shovels and buckets for the kids to play with.


The most fun Lily had on our vacation was not at Six Flags or the Children's Museum, but swimming in the pool at the hotel! (We could have saved a lot of money if we'd known that in advance!) She did a great job swimming with a life vest on, and was paddling her feet to stay upright and move around.


Her crowning achievement was swimming the width of the pool by herself! We caught it in this video (AVI, 18 MB). Michelle and I were both stunned. We want to sign her up for swimming lessons this year. (Click the picture to see the video, or download the file here.)


At Greentree (Lily's day care), the Spanish teacher invited parents to come watch what their children have learned. They each counted to ten in Spanish, named animals and body parts, and named shapes and colors. This video is when she's asking each kid to name the color she's showing. Lily keeps shouting out the answers before the other kids have a chance to respond! I probably shouldn't be proud of that, but I am! (Click to view, or download here.)


Once when I was picking her up from Greentree, she ran into the director's office and sat behind her desk! I told her to get out of there, but not before taking a picture. Now that she was running the day care center, it was time for her to move on to a new school.


Lily really would be starting at a new school soon, and Michelle and I organized some activities to play with her current friends and hopefully ease the transition. Her closest friends are Cailey and Madeline, so the moms brought the three girls to work so they could all have lunch together. (They have lunch together every day, of course, but it's more fun going out somewhere grown up.)


We had a playdate with Madeline one Saturday, and took her and Lily to the Incredible Pizza Company.


Lily had a novel way of playing skeeball, much more efficient than the usual way.


We stayed at Madeline's house for a while after the playdate, and Lily dropped from exhaustion!


Michelle threw a going-away party for Lily, and took pictures of all her classmates. She started going to Greentree when she was almost a year old, so she knows most of these kids very well, and she's known Cailey and Madeline since she was about 6 weeks old.


Here the girls are hugging Lily goodbye. So sad!


The weekend before she started at her new private school, called Lausanne, I organized a party for all the new kids in Lily's pre-kindergarten class to meet each other. All the other parents thought this was a great idea, since they too were worried about their kids adjusting to a new school. Lily didn't play much with the other kids at the party, but at least she got a chance to warm up to them before the first day of school.


Even before the first day of school, Lily already had homework! She had to draw a picture of something she did over the summer, and the parents had to write down her description of it. Her favorite thing was swimming in the pool in St. Louis, so that's what this is a picture of. This is her first homework assignment!


August 18, 2008, was her historic first day of school. Even though it's only pre-kindergarten, this is going to be a much bigger transition for her than starting senior kindergarten or first grade, where she'll already know most of her classmates and the school won't change. Lausanne is a considerably larger campus than Greentree. It goes from pre-kindergarten all the way to 12th grade. The second and third pictures are her new classroom, and the fourth picture is her new teacher, Miss Susan (actually Mrs. Susan Bomar).


Upon entering the classroom, Lily first headed to the computer! That's my girl! Then she worked her way around all the other play areas. I stayed there about twenty minutes, and then hugged and kissed her goodbye. Somewhat surprisingly, she did not cry! She's been going there three weeks now and has never cried when I dropped her off. What makes this especially surprising is that even at the age of three and a half, she occasionally cried in the mornings when we dropped her off at Greentree.


Here's a movie of Lily playing with the dollhouse in her new classroom. (Click to view, or download here.)



One of the things I really like about her new classroom is that the teacher only has seven students. Her entire class is shown here alphabetically: Andre, Andrew, Army, Kyra, Lily, Max, and Zoeya.


Miss Susan sends us a newsletter each week of what they covered at school. Here's the first one. They read a book called "Ollie Goes To School", and another called "Hello World", where they learn to say "Hello" in several languages. They graphed their names in order of length, and looked at pictures of faces from around the world. When they learn a new letter, they also learn the American Sign Language version of it, and they take Spanish and Mandarin Chinese classes every day. Each morning when they come in, their first task is to recognize which card has their name written on it, and put that card on the board. Lily writes her name in all capitals, and the cards have it written as "Lily", but she still knew that was her name, and the other kids all recognized their names at this age too (that surprised me).


Lausanne had a parents' night, and I saw that Miss Susan takes lots of pictures and posted some of them in the room. I didn't bring my camera, but I snapped these pictures with my iPhone. This is Lily in gym class, Spanish class, and waking up from nap time. She looks happy in all the pictures.


After her first week at Lausanne, we visited the Willises on Friday night so she could play with Madeline, and on Sunday we took her to play with Cailey at the Incredible Pizza Company. Here are Lily and Cailey looking cool with their sunglasses in the car.


They ate a little pizza, but did a lot more laughing than eating, and played some games. They collected a lot of candy from one of the games. They both obviously had lots of fun. To top it off, we made a pit stop at Toys R Us on the way back.


On Labor Day we went to the Willises, so Lily got to play with Madeline. They ran around in the sprinkler outside, and Michelle took pictures of them making funny faces when they came back inside.