Backpack-backpack

Ellie started school last week. She's attending a wonderful school, Community Christian, and enjoying it immensely. Her favorite aspects appear to be:

• a bean bag game (every day, this is the first report I receive---the status of the game and who won)
• Spanish class (she was able to name 4 colors and count to 5)
• her backpack (an admittedly vastly oversized one---considering it only transports her snack, juice and 1 envelope - one day, she lost her snack in the maze of all the pockets. Its main redeeming quality is that it's purple just like Dora the Explorer's)

I, however, had a more difficult first week. I came home the first day, and as I was putting Clark down for his morning nap, I glanced in her room. It was dark, neat and empty....so, of course, the tears came. Yesterday she mentioned being a little sad because someone didn't want to play with her for some activity. I almost cried again. I'm not sure how I'm going to get through 12 years of this. Luckily, I shouldn't have post-partum hormones for most of those years :-)

We had a fun weekend in Tampa 2 weekends ago. We got see my brother and his family (who we're shamelessly trying to convince to move to Tallahassee), my step-brothers, Chuck's sister Pat who flew in for the occasion (Chuck's 60th birthday). It was a man-cooking fest on the patio. There was a smoker(pork butt), a grill (sausages) and giant steamer (crabs) and a big pot on the burner of the grill (clams). At any given time, there were at least 2-3 men out there sweating in 100 degree heat with furrowed brows discussing times & temperatures with various electronic devices beeping to keep them updated with time and temperature statuses. The women watched from the air-conditioned living room and congratulated ourselves on being smart enough to be the gender that cooks INSIDE.