Yes, I’m pretty far behind. I think…before the DIY Kitchen Transformation posts…I left off in the middle of our trip to Utah back in March? Yikes, I’m terrible!

Well, for now, let me leave you these photos of the boys on the first day of school. Jacob is getting increasingly annoyed with my photographing him on the first day of school, to which I had to respond, “Get over it, you’re getting photographed.”

Jacob is now in 7th grade. He’s continuing his involvement in French and orchestra, and is taking geometry too. I can’t wait till he’s handed his first proof to complete, ha ha! Most of Jacob’s school work is now done online and he’s been working hard this week to get all the logins and passwords working. It hasn’t been easy…I hope he gets it all worked out. It has taken all my willpower to not email the teachers on his behalf, but I simply can’t do that anymore. He needs to solve this on his own…

Jacob continues to be active in Boy Scouts, and is on the verge of earning his First Class rank. His summer camp experience at Camp Alexander in central Colorado was pretty eventful, with widespread flooding in the area forcing evacuation orders all around him. His troop elected to come home early so Jacob had a truncated week at camp. There’s always next year.

Timmy, who just started 5th grade, is in a great class at his school, an experimental combined 4th/5th grade class for the gifted students. The class has less than 25 students; most of the other classes are closer to 30. He’s already being challenged with the math and language arts lessons. It’s nice not having to focus so much on “teaching to the test”…which isn’t really done overtly here, but succeeding on the end-of-year standardized tests is definitely a priority for most of the other classes.

Timmy’s still my “naturalist” son: he spent the summer helping me with my garden and with my flowers. He enjoys learning about plants and is starting to cook more and plan healthy meals. I’m particularly proud of his making kimbap for the family to take for lunch.

I’m going to use this post to track what things I want to write about on my blog. As I finish each one you will see the entry with a weblink. I can drop the link here. Our family had a wonderfully busy summer!

1. Golden Spike National HIstoric Site, Promontory, Utah

2. Alta Ski Resort, Alta, Utah

3. Denver Comic Con (most of those posts were done primarily for GeekMom, since our family was comp-ed admission so we could write about it for GeekMom, but I will do a post about our family’s experience here).

4. Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia

5. Eastland Alpaca Farm near Lancaster, PA

6. Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, National Air and Space Museum, near Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C.

7. Camping in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Southern Colorado

8. Bishop Castle, near Rye, Colorado (which I also wrote about for GeekMom)

9. Denver Museum of Nature & Science

9. Family Road Trip 2015: Vancouver or Bust!

10. Disney Cruise to Alaska