Shortly after the birthdays, Nora
and I headed off to Austin TX for our big conference adventure with Noni. It
was a blast (as conferencing with my mama always is). Nora enjoyed Thai food,
went to poster sessions, and met her cousin Janet Voight (on the Schultz side),
who studies deep-sea mollusks.
Daddy and Toby welcomed us back to
Oregon with a trip to another Thai restaurant, where Toby occupied my lap until
he was satisfied.
Shortly after this, Toby started
reading. He apparently started out with Seuss’s Hop on Pop, but the
first sentence I personally heard was “trot with the turkeys” from Sandra
Boynton’s Barnyard Dance. I found the spectacle of my baby boy reading
independently completely magical. A week later we caught him adding, measuring
things with a tape, and recognizing numbers up to 100.
Not to be outdone, Nora started
standing on her own. The beginning of summer was also characterized by new
fashion explorations with the ever-sassier Nora; sunglasses really help.
And we went blueberry picking!
Only once, but Toby has passed the threshold for net gain in blueberry-picking:
he now picks more than he eats. We picked as long as Nora slept, and it was
plenty. So much that our frozen blueberry stash looks to last almost until
Christmas, even though both kids eat some almost every day – one of the few
foods we can guarantee will go down. When Nora hears Toby asks for blueberries,
she starts frantically signing “please,” and usually that does me in.
Summer brought a lot of outside
fun. Both kids love to play in the yard, and the pool got a fair bit of use.
June was Nora’s last month with Nanny Elizabeth every day, and we all enjoyed
it while we had it. (She comes back to babysit two evenings a month now. Matt
and I cherish our date night, Toby goes wild with anticipation, and Nora is
happy to see her too.)
Oh yeah, and Nora got her first haircut
– the same day I took the above photo, and recognized the urgency!
The summer was full of learning
and growing, as Nora got closer to walking. This made it easier for her to try
to do EVERYTHING Toby does.
In addition to reading, Toby
started writing. This was fascinating; he went through a phase of not just
writing single letters backwards, but writing entire phrases. Below reads “Toby
to Nanny Elizabeth.”
Our first big family adventure of
the summer was a Schultz family vacation to the Oregon coast (missing only Aunt
Rachael!). It was FANTASTIC. We played on the beach, we played in the water, we
talked and sorted Legos (Toby got the last of the old Schultz collection) and
ate. I didn’t cook a thing all week. Heavenly.
We got out to the beach at least
once, sometimes twice a day. Toby (re)discovered his love of the surf, and
forced Matt or me to go stand in the freezing waves until we couldn’t take it
any more. I lasted longer than Matt because I brought rubber boots! Eventually
Nora got interested in the water too, and then we had to play a lot of
chase-and-grab to keep her out of the waves (strong currents on the Pacific
coast!).
Of course there was a lot of fun
had in the sand, too. And Nora ate SO MUCH of it. If she thought you were about
to take her sand away, she would shove it in her mouth faster than I would have
thought possible. I eventually gave up and figured she’d decide on her own that
it wasn’t so delightful… you know, if I stopped giving her the impression it
was a forbidden treat. (This worked… sort of. At least I stopped wasting my
time.)
She also discovered that beaches
are a great place to practice one of her favorite expressions, GrumpyBaby, or
perhaps Self-Respecting Discerning Baby?
Everyone enjoyed the tidepools.
They are one of the glories of the pacific northwest; at low tide, the rocky
coast is uncovered. We explored amazing aggregations of anemones and barnacles.
Nestled in between we found starfish, crabs, and even a tiny dead octopus. I
don’t think it’s possible to get enough of this kind of fun.
Dune climbing was another great
activity – Toby pretty much ran straight up the enormous dune by the tidepools,
and kept yelling at me to be faster coming up behind him. I was a proud mama
when I finally made it to the top.
Matt and I actually snuck off the
day before to hang out with friends sans kids and climbed the same dune the
back way (easier); this picture gives a better sense of how tall the dune
actually is.
We thought Nora would start
walking, but she didn’t.
Lots of good family time.
Toby barfed on the way home.
Welcome back to life! (Nora shows no signs of getting motion sickness, by the
way. Thank goodness.)
We had a few weeks between our two
summer trips, and the kids spent it being awesome. Nora started waving. Toby
kept reading more, and starting writing words all by himself. Toby got excited
about a sewing kit. Nora started her now long-standing (no pun intended)
relationship with her very own kitchen drawer, and Toby inspired her to start
driving vehicles at a much earlier age than he ever did himself.
The parade of cute clothes hasn’t
slowed down, and a new favorite was added after Aunt Becky went to a vintage
resale shop. This is 1970’s Carter’s, people, and it is CHIC.
Blog aficionados will recall that
after Toby was born, my hair got straighter. After Nora, it got curlier again!
So weird that I had to take another picture.
Nora actually took her first steps
at the end of July, after standing (very proudly) all alone in the middle of
the floor a week earlier. But then we went on our next big trip, so she spent
many days focused on absorbing new surroundings and pretending the walking thing
never happened.
The next big adventure was flying
out to the Midwest for the Royer family reunion, celebrating Grandpa Jim and
Grammie’s 25th wedding anniversary. We were very busy getting ready
to go; Toby even got to come to school with me for a day, since he still had a
bit of a fever. (A bit of a fever at the end of a really long, intense illness…
FORESHADOWING!!)
The trip out to Indiana went
pretty well, with the kids enjoying themselves at airports on both ends (they
share a love of rocks that is quite charming).
We had a few nice days at Noni’s house,
including a fantastic visit with the cousins to the Yellow Spring that the town
in Ohio is named for (and a place I spent a lot of time in the fall after Matt
and I met in 2013).
But then, just as we were getting
ready to go to Richmond for the big amazing party, I started to feel a little
under the weather. It turned into a truly horrible illness, with day after day
of fever so high I could only lie in bed and moan. Luckily, there were lots of
loving family and fun activities to keep everybody else safe, happy, and
entertained. It’s just that there are no pictures, and most of the stories are
second-hand.
The kids both enjoyed swimming in
the pond with Grandpa and the cousins. They ate tons of yummy food. We got to
see our Kerksiek and Roman cousins, and THEIR kids. There was an amazing
firework show (a fine Grandpa Jim tradition). I started to feel kinda okay just
in time to say goodbye to everyone. We spent our quiet last day in Richmond
taking the kids fossil-hunting in the Whitewater River canyon; it turns out I
grew up right in the middle of some of the world’s finest Paleozoic fossils.
Toby had just been reading about that era, so it was pretty fantastic to go
find some rocks to bring home.
Then we trotted off to the
airport, all innocence, not realizing that hackers had crashed Delta’s
computers nationwide. We spent a VERY long but fairly entertaining (at least
for the kids) day in the airport, followed by a night in the airport hotel on
Delta’s dime.
The next day we got wise and
figured out BEFORE leaving for the airport that our third attempted flight out
had also been cancelled. That meant a fun day at my favorite Children’s Museum!
There was too much fantastickness to detail, but some of the highlights: Toby
excavated a fake dinosaur, Nora and I touched a REAL T. rex fossil (I cannot
overemphasize how mind-blowing I found this), and Toby got to play at being an
astronaut.
Then it was back to the airport,
with only a little more torture when we were moved out of our
middle-of-the-night connection plane after we’d settled in, and rushed across
the Minneapolis airport in the middle of the night. I couldn’t stomach flying
again after that for a long, long time.
That’s probably enough for one
post, so to be continued…
