Darr Family Blog

Weekly Happenings: We survived our first full week of summer vacation, haha. I don’t think I quite realized just how much time was eaten up by dropping Joseph off at pre-k, having him there for a few hours, and then going to pick him up until we weren’t doing it anymore! We’ve been eating up all the free time, though. It’s nice to be able to relax. We went to the library to get Joseph new books, had a park play-date, had friends over (when my visiting teachers came), played in the sprinklers (well, Joseph did), etc.

The Weekly Weather: We had a storm come through last Sunday while we were in church, but the rest of the week was sunny. I think we’re supposed to have another storm come through this next week, but it’s supposed to mostly be like this past week was: warm and sunny.

What Paul’s Been Up To: He’s been working on projects for school and has been busy as usual at work. He also put our pool up so that we could go swimming yesterday. He got to do some fun stuff, too. He went to go see the new Wonder Woman movie with a friend on Friday night…then another friend asked him yesterday morning if he wanted to go see it in the evening, so he saw it again, haha. He said it was a good enough movie that he didn’t mind seeing it twice. 🙂 He doesn’t get much “guy time”, so I’m glad he has some friends that he can get out and do stuff like that with.

What Sarah’s Been Up To: My first experience teaching Gospel Doctrine (last Sunday) went off without a hitch. Since the other teacher and I flip-flop, I get a break today. Other than that, I mainly just kept the kids healthy, happy, and entertained. I took the kids to the park to meet up with friends, enjoyed a visit from my visiting teachers, I set up the sprinkler so that Joseph could play in it, and the kids and I took the inaugural dip in the pool (Joseph stayed in longer than Abigail and I did…since she’s still so little, she gets cold easily, so we didn’t stay in very long).

What Joseph’s Been Up To: He had a great time hanging with friends. He also had fun doing his normal fun stuff: playing with toys, video games, “tablet time”, and entertaining Abigail. Paul ordered him some workbooks, so he does a page out of each of those to help keep his mind fresh. 🙂 He keeps asking me when it’s going to be August and tells me that he’s “sooooooo excited for kindergarten”. 😀

What Abigail’s Been Up To: Now to get to the “milestone moment” that I eluded to in the title of this post. We’ve transitioned from one meal of solid food per day to four meals. She has oatmeal in the morning and evening and then for her two other meals, she has a veggie and a fruit. She still gets a sizable bottle with each meal to make sure her belly gets full. 🙂 At first, she didn’t seem very excited about the baby food itself, but would practically devour the oatmeal (as in, I couldn’t get it into her mouth fast enough). After thinking about it, I thought it might be a texture thing (the baby food is quite a bit runnier than I make the oatmeal). So, acting on what can only be described as a prompting from Heavenly Father, I added a bit of the dried oatmeal to the baby food, making it the consistency of  her oatmeal. It was like night and day! She ate really well yesterday, without getting frustrated. It was so great. 🙂 She’s also sleeping better (she normally wakes up a bit any time between 3-5 but goes back to sleep pretty quickly and sleeps until about 6:30 or so), hasn’t been spitting up much (or some days, not at all), and is an even happier baby (if that could be possible). We also got a new baby swing (we pulled out Joseph’s old one to realize that it was pretty worn; luckily they’re pretty inexpensive) which she loves.

This Week in Pictures:

Weekly Happenings: After a few almost picture-less posts, I think I’ll make up with this one. Monday was a holiday (Memorial Day), so we headed out for some family fun. It was raining in the morning, so we headed to the mall to wait out the storm. After it cleared up, we headed to the kiddie park (a small amusement park from the 1920’s designed especially for small kids) and then to the zoo. It was a pretty fun-filled day. This past week also included Joseph’s awards ceremony due to it being his last week of pre-k. He’s already asking me when it will be August so that he can start kindergarten. 🙂 I also took him to a birthday party for one of his school friends while Paul and Abigail hung out at home.

The Weekly Weather: It rained quite a bit. Tuesday had the worst of it with flash flooding happening throughout parts of San Antonio. The other storms didn’t yield quite so much at once.

What Paul’s Been Up To: The only really out of the ordinary thing that happened for him was that his commute was rather interesting on Tuesday. The flash flooding closed one of the connectors that he normally uses, so he had to find a detour home (he saw cars stuck in standing water while doing so). Luckily, that was the worst of it, and he got home safely.

What Sarah’s Been Up To: Not too much out of the ordinary for me, either. I teach my first lesson in Gospel Doctrine (adult Sunday School class) today, so I spent some time getting that ready.

What Joseph’s Been Up To: He had tons of fun on Monday and then again at his awards ceremony. It was also an ice cream party, so one award he got (other than his completion certificate) was ice cream-themed. He received the “voluminous vanilla fudge award” for having such a voluminous vocabulary. 😀 He also had fun at the birthday party playing in the water with his friends.

What Abigail’s Been Up To: She’s gotten pretty quick at rolling over onto her tummy (but gets irritated rather quickly because she can’t get back over). One night, I went to check on her because she was fussing in her bed. I was surprised to see her turned completely 180 degrees from how I had left her in bed. So it begins, haha. One cute thing she did happened while I was holding her. She noticed the shadow of her hand on the back of the chair and kept trying to pick it up. I love all the discovering that this age yields! I also moved her up a size in clothing. Now she’s in 12 month/9-12 month stuff (mainly for length; the 9 month/6-9 month stuff was getting too short).

This Week in Pictures:

Weekly Happenings: This past week seemed to fly by. We were sort of homebodies for most of it. One afternoon, Paul got off of work early so that he could be home while a plumber came to work on the pressure reducing valve (PRV). It’s nice having good water pressure again! On Friday, since Paul had the day off, we headed to the zoo after school. It was another peaceful right-before-closing visit. Paul and Joseph checked out the reptile house while I fed Abigail and then we just sort of wandered around until closing. We then went out for dinner at Augie’s. It was a pretty fun afternoon.

The Weekly Weather: As eluded to by the title of the post, it’s been rather warm and humid. You’d think I’d be used to it (we have been here for almost five years, after all), but nope. I still think it feels gross out, haha. We’re supposed to get some rain this week…hopefully that will clear it out for a bit (it does that sometimes).

What Paul’s Been Up To: A bit more about the replacement of the PRV. Long story short, it stopped working, so the water pressure in our house (and other places, like the irrigation system) was pretty poor. Once Paul found it (its access panel had been accidentally covered by sod when we first moved in), he tried to get it off to replace it with a new one, but it was covered with so much sediment it ended up needing to be cut off. He watched the plumber work so that he could do repairs like that in the future. He made a post about it on his blog that you can read about here if you want to see pictures of it all. He did most of the grunt work ahead of time, so all the plumber needed to really do was cut off the old one and put on the new one. Other than that, it’s been basically school and work like normal.

What Sarah’s Been Up To: I haven’t done anything too out of the ordinary. Just sort of pluggin’ along.

What Joseph’s Been Up To: He is almost done with school for the year! He basically has three more days this next week and then he’ll be done with pre-k. It’s crazy that we’re already at this point! He had some fun things happen at school this past week. The book fair was back and was buy one, get one free, so he got a couple of new books. He also got to attend a couple of fun parties. One was for perfect attendance. He hasn’t quite had perfect attendance all year (there were a few days back in the fall when he was sick), but the way they do perfect attendance parties is cool. Instead of it only being for perfect attendance for the entire school year, they do a couple of parties: one about halfway through and then one at the end. Since he had perfect attendance during the last half of the school year, he got to attend the party. It was outside with water games and other outdoor activities. He also got to go to a party in the library for turning in a bunch of reading logs throughout the year. This one was a glow-in-the-dark party, so he came home with a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stuff.

What Abigail’s Been Up To: She’s been really “chatty” this past week (looking at us and making tons of coos, shrieks, and other sounds). She also officially hit her five month mark. She’s been sort of digging at her ears, but since she hasn’t had a fever or anything, I’m betting it’s still teething pain. Poor little bug. 🙁 She hasn’t been incredibly fussy, though, so that’s good. She has also discovered herself in mirrors and loves to smile and “talk” to the “other” baby (I’m still not 100% sure she knows it’s her).

This Week in Pictures: