Thomas: Geared-up and Gettin' Hot

So much to tell you about! I'm going to break it into several posts. Let's start with... Thomas! He spoke his first Australian word on Halloween. We were done trick-or-treating and were driving out of town to a star-gazing thing. We passed a really halloweened-up house and he said, "We should go back home and collect my pumpkin bag." Collect! They've gotten to his brain.

They've gotten to his body, too. His class and every elementary class in the school has had swimming lessons every day for the past 2 weeks. In nine classes, he's gone from a kid who screamed for a dry towel while getting his hair washed to swimming under water and retrieving toys from the bottom of the pool! I can't do that! Miss Taryn Nottle, the P.E. teacher at Living Waters school, gets all the credit. She spent her time with the kids who had the least experience and our Thomas bloomed like a waterlilly. Let him re-phrase that to, "I'm just like a boat now."

My aqua-aerobics classes are at this same town pool.
We set up one of those inflated-ring-topped waterbag pools in the backyard and we've all been enjoying it. Temps have already hit 105, but they hide the truth by saying it's, "42."

I think we'll spend a lot of time wet or indoors in the up-coming months.

It kind of messes with me to have people talking about spring horse race season and summer vacation coming up and Thanksgiving is around the corner and the stores have Christmas trees up.


Speaking of Halloween (I did up at the top, remember?), this is my friend, Renee.
How often do you think she gets to wear THAT vest?
Renee comes with Chloe, too cute in her handmade rainbow pony costume; also Ty, a Big Boy Thomas really likes and two teen girls who make great sitters.

Since this post is about Thomas, I guess I put them in to show we ARE making friends and even some little boy friends at school. No pics of them yet.
Oh, wait! Yes, on the field trip...