What's new?

Abby's decided that she doesn't really want to be photographed or in any way immortalized this summer.  I guess that's what the early teen years will do to a girl, but we are a family and we do family things and I will document it.  I don't want her to look back on the summer of 2013 and wonder why all of our pictures of our family trips and family fun-days are just of Finn.  I told her if she chooses to be uncooperative, then I will these kinds of pictures and I am okay with that:

In other big Abby news, the girl has been living with us for 5 years.  Some days it feels like only yesterday we smuggled her off in our car, blazing a westerly trail across Missouri, each of us reeling with the change of events.  It was the beginning of a long summer and none of us were prepared for the whirlwind 5 years that followed.  I admit at least weekly to Uriah that I thought this whole process would be different.  Usually I wonder why it isn't easier, and so I've spent the last 5 years trying to reconcile the way I thought it would be - this raising someone else's kid - and the way it really is.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: step-parenting is hands-down the hardest kind of parenting.  I feel like I could write a book on the subject.

And this boy.  Oh...this boy.  He went to his first birthday party this month - I dropped him off and picked him back up a few hours later, and I nearly started crying as I drove home because he's such a big boy.  Will this be what leaving him at school for Kindergarten is like?  If so, I think I'll need to give serious consideration to home schooling because I don't think my heart can take it!

And so we are weaving our way through this summer.  It's full as a tick already.  We're spending next week in the dirty, dirty South with my sister and brother-in-law.  My precious sugar pie nephew will be hanging out with us all week long (we've sprung him from daycare for the week!  Lucky him.  But mostly lucky us!).  I'll get a good dose of baby-fix, the kids will get some cousin/auntie/uncle time and Uriah will be lonely and pining for us back here in Minnesota.

I was lamenting to Uriah last night that I just haven't been writing enough lately.  I have things to say, but the words seem to get stuck between my head and my fingers.  I guess I just need to power through and see what comes of it.  So...more writing for the rest of the summer.  Pinky-promise.