Whoa, baby. Summer is busy.

Geez. It's been almost three weeks since I posted. Whoever called it Summer "break" was seriously disturbed.

We have been busy. That is the understatement of the year. Our homestudy has taken off. In the last three weeks we have completed all of the paperwork, attended our homestudy interview and class, had our home visit, and now we sit on our hands and wait until the agency finishes our report. Probably about four weeks to activation. And away we go!

Olivia has been talking a lot about baby brother or sister. She often says she wants a baby brother AND sister. I tell her it's a tall order. She's been repeating that to everyone. "I'm going to have a baby brother and sister, but Mommy says it's a tall order, but that's OK." So. Possible, but not likely. But she can keep praying.

Meanwhile, Olivia seems to get the whole adoption thing. She knows that she grew in Miss Samantha's tummy and knows without a doubt that we are Mommy and Daddy. I guess that's good enough. I'm sure more questions will come with baby, but she seems to drink stuff in and process it pretty well, so I'm not really worried.

We spent last weekend in the car, mostly. We visited Joe's Grampa (10 hour drive), who just turned 95 and was having a big party. He is 95 but with the energy of most people in their 70s, and it's always fun to see him. We came home by way of my brother's house (5 hour drive), where we saw my niece in their local amateur circus. It was fabulous. It's really amazing what those kids do. Then we came home. Five days, four nights, four different hotels, more than 25 hours in the car. Olivia napped less than 90 minutes (total) in the car in ALL that time. But she slept well at night. And she was pretty well behaved in the car. The trip went so much better than expected, except for the "trip cold" I contracted that is now beating me down. *Sigh* The joys of traveling.

Today I'm processing garden produce and trying to rest and stay inside. IT IS HOT. We've had temps in the 90s and dew points in the 80s for, well, what seems like forever. Swimming doesn't even feel good now because most pools are now bath temperature, and the air is so damp that it just feels like pouring hot water over you in a steam bath. Yuck.

Olivia has picked this horribly humid time of year to decide that she wants to experiment with straight hair. So we bought a straight iron and tried. It started out straight-ish. Then after an hour outside it looked like this.
I won't even bother showing you what it looked like by the end of the day. Yikes! But it did give me an opportunity to trim the ends, making it infinitely easier to style. I didn't realize the ends were so damaged and tangled. I blame the hours in the pool.

Oh, speaking of the pool, while we were swimming in one of the hotel pools, Olivia decided to get brave and swim the entire length by herself! I was just a few steps in front of her the whole time, but still...she never needed me. Just jumped in at one end, swam underwater a few feet, then doggie-paddled to the end. The kid is a fish (no lessons, just inborn talent). Too bad the chlorine ruins her hair.