August, already?

Can it really be August?

More than half the year is gone already! Grace is growing so fast. I know, I say that in almost every post. She's not just growing taller, she's growing in her speech as well. She has a great vocabulary, but recently we've noticed that she's using a lot more sentences and is very much aware of what is happening around her. She is very independent. Now when we go to the store, she doesn't want me to put her in the cart. She wants to be a big girl and walk. So, I always tell her two rules. Today she said she wanted to walk at the store so I said "What are the two rules?" (this was the first time I have asked her to say them to me without me saying them first) She said "No running" and "I have to obey my mommy". She can be so funny. We are having a great summer. We've been going to the zoo a lot and enjoying the nice weather.

We had a flood a couple weeks ago. It rained like seven inches in one night, and our village's sewer system just couldn't keep up. We ended up with a soaked carpet and tons of sewage on the floor. We hired a team to come out and clean up and remove the carpet. We now need to put new flooring down. This is a long process for us, and so we have very little living space. Our Family room was in the basement: our TV and most of Grace's toys, our computer and my sewing/craft area. A lot of our belongings are currently in our diningroom/living room, so now Grace has very little room to play. Our TV is just connected for DVD and VHS since we don't have an antennae up here. I go stir crazy spending so much time in such little space.

We went camping on the last weekend of July. I was glad to get out of the house and get away for a couple days. It was fun, but a lot of work. We arrived on Friday evening and left Sunday morning. The minute we stepped out of the car on Friday, we were swarmed with mosquitoes. I have probably more than 100 mosquito bites on my body. I'm not kidding. Grace didn't sleep well. She kept waking up. She woke up at 6am and wouldn't go back to sleep and wouldn't leave me alone. I had a restless night sleep because I kept waking up when she woke up. On Saturday we went to Castle Rock State Park in Wisconsin. We went swimming at the beach. It was Grace's first time at a beach and she loved it. She was so worn out from swimming, playing and not enough sleep that she fell asleep on her towel. That night she slept a little better. Sunday morning we broke camp. I went witout Brian, so I had to do all the packing and such myself. It was harder than I thought since Grace was so tired, hot, crabby, and getting eaten alive by mosquitos. I left as soon as I got everything packed in the car. I felt bad leaving our friends there, but Grace couldn't stand being bitten by mosquitos any longer, and I didn't have a spouse there to pack the car while I comforted Grace or to comfort Grace while I packed the car...so...we left.

I am looking forward to this last month of summer vacation. Here are a few pictures from the past month.