Four Feet More

My summer vacation is going by really fast. There was so much I wanted to do while school was out, but I just don't seem to have the time. My project list may have been a little ambitious, but I have made some progress.

• The Kids' Lifebooks: A lot of progress made here. I've put in all the new birth family information and have included most of the major events from Vika and Eamon's first year home. Unfortunately, I'm completely inept at scrapbooking, so I tend to fiddle with the pages until I finally give up in a fit of frustration and just paste the text and pictures down, usually in the configuration I had them in the first time I tried the layout. I'll post some pages later.
• Disneyland Photo Album: Complete! I did this online on Shutterfly, and hope to receive it in the mail soon.
  
• Blog Book: Pretty much no progress here. I'm printing the blog using Blurb, and it's slow going.
• Christmas Knitting Projects: Well, all I can say is, I've bought the yarn for a few of these! I've still got plenty of time though, right? No way will I be knitting furiously up until Christmas Eve this year. ;)
• PIF Projects: I finished the second one of these - now I just have to mail it out and finish project number 3. I've been completely slacking on this.
  
• Eamon's "Knight" Sweater: This is about 1/8th done. *sigh* I'm creating my own pattern for this one and have restarted it 3 times now.... In the end, it should look like a roll-neck raglan sweater with a Gryffindor lion on the front. If I ever get it done, I'll post a picture.
  
• Vika's Caplet: DONE! And she likes it!

Meanwhile, in other non-project related news, we had our "National Night Out" last night. Do any of your neighborhoods do this? It's when neighbors get together for a mini-block party to get to know each other. The idea is that this will help prevent crime. We had Dr. Pepper floats at ours (Which is just wrong. What happened to the root beer?), a fire engine (complete with cute, flirty firemen), as well as a bunch of games organized by the older neighborhood kids.

After much lobbying on my and Jeff's part, our neighbor's dog, DaVinci, won the dog trick competition (he initially scurried away with his tail between his legs, but then found some courage and jumped though a hoop. Twice. Now that's talent!). No one won the chalk drawing competition, although an interesting hopscotch course did get honorable mention.

The highlight of the evening though was watching my son discover the Hula Hoop. Now, Eamon is not what I would call coordinated. He's inherited my family curse for clumsiness and often trips over pieces of lint. However, sometimes he surprises me with his agility. Like when he did a full-on flip into my brother's pool. Where did he learn that? Last night was another one of those times. At first, he was completely spastic with the hula hoop. It would kind of spin around his knees once or twice before falling to the ground. But Eamon kept at it, and by the end of the evening, he was keeping that hoop circling around his waist for longer than I can! He even began to do some tricks, ending with the hoop on a raised foot. Seriously, the kid was good! The other neighbors were watching him with these huge smiles on their faces, enjoying his enthusiasm. At then end of the night, the organizers gave Eames the hula hoop to take home. All in all, it was a fun evening.