First weeks of summer

It's been a long time without a real update. Sorry about that, loyal readers (all three of you). In the meanwhile the clan has been off on two short (four-day) vacations, one to Ricketts Glen State Park (about fifty miles west of Scranton), where we hung around in a small cabin and did some light hiking (very light) in what passes for mountains in Pennsylvania. The other one was to a rented vacation house at Chincoteague, Virginia, i.e., a trip to the beach. Both were a lot of fun. Both kids liked Ricketts Glen, and they also found they liked the beach, though the waves made them nervous. Zeke in fact was in some distress the first few times he watched his mother go into the surf.

In other news, Talia is really talking. She's hard to understand, but she is definitely stringing short sentences together. She imitates her brother a lot. She has a few fairly adorable verbal idiosyncrasies, like saying something that sounds like "see" instead of "it's" -- thus, when eating, "See good!" or when playing, "See funny!" (You can see an example of that last one in the video at the bottom of this post.) For a while, when she was eating, she'd always comment enthusiastically, "I yike it!" but that seems to have passed. Her other habit is screaming at the top of her lungs when something excites her, and also dancing around, with lots of prodding from the audience. The two of them, at least at the moment, are getting along famously and really enjoy one another most of the time.

I have no real good stories off the top of my head, aside from the little one-liners that I've been posting. But there are a few nice photos. If you are reading this in an email, you probably won't be able to see them; click here to see this post on the web, where everything ought to work properly. Same goes for the little video at the end of the post.

First, here are the photos from Ricketts Glen.




(Note: Some of my favorites aren't visible here because they show someone else's kids. If you want to see those, go to Flickr.com, which is a site I use for managing digital photos, sign up for an account, and then visit my page and add me as a "contact," either as "friend" or "family." I can walk you through this if need be. After that, the hidden photos should be visible here. If this is too much of a pain, well, eventually I'll come up with something else. Also: I have left out many of my own photos that show only scenery, but if you want to see those, they're here as well. Ricketts Glen is a very nice place.)

Here are some Chincoteague photos. For some reason we only took very few (sixteen). You can also see them here.



And finally, here are a couple of other recent favorites. Personally, my favorites are the ones of Zeke and Talia perched together on the "changing table" (i.e., a foam pad on top of a dresser), both goofing around. (For some reason they're not displayed together, but they're part of a series, and it'll be obvious when you flip through them.) All those can also be seen here.



And, one last little tidbit, here is a one-and-three-quarters-minute video of Talia and Zeke jumping up and down in a crib. That's all it is, but it cracks me up anyhow.