summer ends and fall begins...

Well, summer is officially over and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Dylan took swim classes, enrolled in the summer program for Preschool of Rock and went camping for a second time. Swim classes went fine, though they were just a quick course to get comfortable with the water. That much we accomplished so the next round of swim lessons should hopefully introduce the actual swimming part. Preschool of Rock was really fun and I'm sad I don't have the time to keep taking Dylan on Friday mornings. We both enjoyed the singing, dancing, and drum circles once a week.

The first picture below is from the camping trip -- it's John and Keith throwing Dylan back and forth. The place we chose this year had this amazing pool. Our camping group grew to include all the Moreira siblings: Tia (Victoria) and John, Seb and Lala (Lisa), and then 3/4th of the Gonzalez siblings, with Alexa and Bri and their two little ones, Melissa and Brendan, and their brother Jason. They would have had a full crew if Jason hadn't forgotten to invite his twin brother Christian, who he also lives with. :)

After the camping trip we spent a week at the beach with the Mason family. The beginning was a little rocky because the three of us were sick with some sort of flu. Thankfully, no one caught the bug from us during the trip. Keith's turned into pulmonary bronchitis and he spent a few days in bed. Dylan had been the first to get sick so he was the first get better and he enjoyed the entire week playing with his cousins who were so cute and so nice to him (they let him play cards with them and even win at Go-Fish). As usual, we enjoyed our nightly ice-cream runs, we made trips to the aquarium, the boardwalk and played lots of game since the week was a bit rainy. Once I was feeling 100% I got to play tennis with my niece Bryanna and got a haircut from my niece Kayla.

We squeezed everything we could out of summer. A weekend at LBI with the Kurz's, some quality time with the Hallers, some road trips, lots of family time, and an appropriate amount of BBQ-ing. We had a little hurricane party at my parents after my brother and sister were evacuated from Hoboken and are lucky that nobody's homes were impacted too much from Irene. Our town was pretty devastated though -- weeks later there are still schools that never opened and homes with all their stuff on the front yard from all the flooding, so we were lucky.

And now that it's Fall, Dylan started preschool. I signed him up for two days a week at a Co-op preschool so I will be in the classroom with him once a month as a teacher's aide. I'm looking forward to this experience and actually being in class with him. All the moms got together at a playground date so the kids could meet before school started. I was so sad that I had to work but my friend Mindy was wonderful enough to take Dylan to play with the other kids. So his first day of school went pretty smoothly since he already knew other kids. So far, he's had one week of school -- that went pretty well, except that he immediately got sick and stayed home on his third day of school. The pictures below are from his first day of school. So far he likes it. He's also started soccer on Saturday mornings and though he was a bit overwhelmed on his first day, he did play a little more on his second day and hopefully he'll start to warm up to it and have fun. He's in the soccer class with his new good friend Ian ... we seem to have a budding bromance on our hands. Ian is a friend of the family and another little bi-lingual Uruguan boy who lives 10 minutes from our house. It's a perfect match for playdates.