Things have been hectic this fall: soccer has been in full swing; the kids have been busy with schoolwork; and I’ve taken two business trips and gone camping with Joe’s Adventure Guides circle. Hopefully things will slow down for a bit—just in time for us to careen headlong into the holidays. Here’s a small collection of previously un-posted photos from the summer of 2011 that I wanted to get online before working on the next batch of more recent pictures.

After much back-and-forth between Blue Shield of California and the Center for Speech, Language and Occupational Therapy, William has finally started speech therapy. He’s doing two 30–minute sessions each week and seems to be taking to it pretty well. They’ve started him off with some simple sentences that are of direct value to him, such as ”I want milk,” and it seems to be working in that he’s talking a bit more around the house. He still uses single-word imperatives most of the time—“up”, “down”, “house”, etc.—but his vocabulary is definitely growing; sometime this last week, he started to say “toast”, which he pronounces as “oash” and uses for everything from english muffins to frozen waffles.

Joe started wearing orthodontic headgear this weekend, and he is none too happy about it. Fortunately, he only has to wear it at night, so there’s no social component to his disdain—he just finds it uncomfortable. I’m sure he’ll get used to it soon; the good news is that if this goes well, he stands a good chance of avoiding the need for braces, which would be a minor miracle considering how hard he found it to give up sucking his thumb. It would also be a lucky break for our finances, considering the fact that it seems likely that Julia will be having work done nearly though the end of the decade.

Speaking of Julia, she continues to adapt to junior high—or, as they call it out here, middle school. She’s having a great time walking and biking to school each day with her friends and genuinely seems to be enjoying her classes. There have been a few hiccups both academically and socially, but I‘m optimistic she just needs to calibrate her mindset to the different level of expectations in this new context.

Gallery: Summer 2011.