It's summertime!

School is OVER!! Josh lived through his first year of teaching! And it was a very successful year. Not perfect, of course (and Josh will definitely tell you that), but very good. His students learned a lot and did fairly well on the state tests in reading and math. This week he's recuperating, next week he has teacher prep time, then the last two weeks of June is summer school. It's required for all KIPP students. It's a lot lower key than the school year though. It only goes until 2:30 instead of 5, though he still has to stay at school until 5. But then he gets all his prep done at school, which is nice. It's been fun to have him home this week. We went out to lunch today, and later this week we're going to go to a park and the library and the Children's Museum and probably to the beach.

I went to school with Josh the last two days, Thursday and Friday of last week. Thursday they had a book celebration. They had just finished reading "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," so they had treats and played games (including White Witch Freeze Tag, invented by Josh), then watched the movie. I made cookies and we bought popcorn for them to watch. Cora and I left at the beginning of the movie so she could take a nap.

Speaking of naps . . . I don't think I've posted about Cora's nap situation. Starting at least in mid-April (it may have been earlier, but that's when I noticed and started keeping track), Cora has been extremely inconsistent in her napping. Over a four week period she took about 2 weeks worth of naps, including 5 that were really short. In May she had a few more naps, and they were almost all long enough. She'd go almost a week without a nap, then 4-6 days where she took good ones. It has been really, really frustrating for me because it seems like nothing has helped. I've been trying to put her to bed early when she doesn't nap like I'm supposed to. I have definitely not been as consistent as I should be, which probably adds to my frustration. It's been almost 9 weeks since I started keeping track of her naps and trying to get her back onto a schedule, and she still isn't. In the last two weeks, she's had 6 good naps in a row, then 6 no-nap days, then 3 good naps, and then today she didn't take one. One silver lining is that when she does get a nap, she tends to take a nap the next day, and so on. That shows that it is probably just overtiredness that keeps her from napping. So it's up to me to make sure she goes to bed early on the days that she doesn't take naps so that she makes up her sleep.

In happier news, she has fallen in love with her potty. Every time we change her diaper, she says "Potty? Potty?" very adorably. I've started doing diaper changes in the bathroom so she doesn't have to travel very far bare-bottomed. And then she'll just sit on the potty for 20 minutes. Sometimes she pees, sometimes she doesn't. I haven't started actually potty training her yet because we're going on a trip this summer and I know that will throw her off, but I'll probably start when we get back. I'm looking forward to quitting the diapers!

Sorry about not having any pictures this week. Maybe next time!