Tuesday was the first day of school in Union County.  Eric started 6th grade at the (brand new) Cuthbertson Middle School, and Jake and Alex are now in 1st and 4th grades at Kensington Elementary.  For some reason, I was a lot happier about it than they were.

Eric is really smart, I have no idea why they make him go to the “Slow Children” bus stop.

Jake and Alex still have to go to the bus stop very early.  They don’t like it.

And Izzy always likes to go to the bus stop with Eric, if she can.  She just adores him, its really fun to watch.

My kids never had a chance to be eyeglass-free.  I have glasses, Jennifer has glasses, my parents both have glasses and Jennifer’s parents both have glasses.  I’m actually pretty surprised that we’ve gotten this far without needing them yet.

Alex got to get them first, and I’m sure he wont be the last.

The glasses are Wal-Mart 50.00 specials, and I imagine he’s going to lose and/or break them a few times.  He’s concerned that he looks goofy in them, but I told him he looked pretty cool.  It would really help if some unbiased observers were to comment about how good he looks in them too…(hint, hint).

Anyway, I’m kind of glad that summer is coming to an end.  School starts on Tuesday, what fun that will be…

Yesterday my little sister got married up at my parent’s house at the lake.  It was nice to see everyone, and I got to take some pictures of the wedding for them.  She married a very nice guy, and I’m sure they’ll be really happy.

Here’s everyone on the Loytty side of the family while we were waiting to start.  Pat and Dave are the ones in the middle.  My hair is still growing back, I look like I’m just bald now, not a cancer victim.  I put some of the pictures I took up for the family (or anyone else) to look at here.

The boys were getting kind of shaggy, so it was HAIRCUT DAY.  For some reason, Eric and Alex feel the same way about haircuts as they do about other aspects of hygiene:  they are against it.  Luckily, I have the iron hand, so they got haircuts with a minimum of grumbling. 

Before

After

Now they look less like hoodlums, and more like fine young gentlemen.  Other than that, it’s been a calm weekend.  Eric had a nice birthday, and then went to a sleepover last night.  We’ve also cleaned up some and went geocaching yesterday.

I have no idea how things go by so quickly.  It seems as if Eric just turned TEN, and here is is turning eleven:

As you can see, he needs a haircut and a bath.  Yesterday we went to see the movie GI Joe, which was perfect for eleven year olds.  I ate some Milk Duds. 

After the movies, we went to eat at Fuddruckers, which is fine dining for kids.  Then, we went home and Eric and I worked on putting together the Lego set that you see in the picture above. Legos are a LOT different than they were when I was eleven.  For one thing, they come with little DOLLS.  Eric got mad at me because I kept putting the little Lego Jedis into compromising positions:

I am a weirdo.

A lot of time, I’ll fall asleep, and when I wake up, discover someone has climbed into bed with me.  Sometimes it’s Izzy, other times it’s Jake.  Jakes problem is that he brings legos with him, and it’s not very comfortable to wake up with a hard piece of plastic digging into your side.

One of the good things about Jake is that he wont wake up when the flash goes off, so I can take pictures of him while he’s sleeping.  The downside is that he’s a very mobile sleeper, so he tries to knock you off the bed all night.  He also grinds his teeth, which is a horrible sound to listen to.

My hair was getting too long, so I needed it cut.  Since Jennifer was gone, and I didn't really want to go to the barbershop with all 4 of them, I just did it at home.

The bad thing about radical haircuts is that when you get halfway into them and decide its not such a good idea after all, you’ve already gone too far and have to just keep going.

I was looking for “Bruce Willis”, but ended up with “Curley Howard”.

Jennifer was in San Francisco this weekend on a combination business/birthday trip, so we were left to our own devices again.  Usually, summer is easy for kid activities because I can take them to the pool and wear them right out.  Unfortunately, this weekend we had a lot of rain, so we had to stay in the house for the most part.

We did get out some on Saturday, we found a geocache and went to lunch at the Flying Biscuit, where we also got Jennifer’s birthday present.  One nice thing about the kids getting bigger is that its easier to take them places, without having to worry about them burning the place down or running in different directions.

I hope everyone has a good week, and that it STOPS RAINING.