Quite a drought, I know. Somehow summer felt busier than the rest of the year, or maybe I just didn't feel like sitting in front of the computer any longer than I had to when it was hot out. Your wrists get sort of sweaty from leaning on the keyboard and, well, yuck. First things first: after months of trying, Max figured out how to harness the strength to jump. Very cool. He spent weeks bouncing around, 2 inches at a time, announcing, "Dad, I'm jumping!" and inviting everyone around to join the fun ("Dad, jump now. You like it!"). It is tiring to jump, and, actually, I do not like it. But Max likes it a lot.

This shot is a good representative of the entire summer, because we managed to score almost 3 weeks lounging on Cape Cod. A typical day saw us at the beach by 10 am to squeeze in a few hours of swimming before nap time. Max got himself so wiped out from jumping around in the sand that he rarely was awake when we left the parking lot and sometimes didn't make it to the car without crashing out on someone's shoulder. This fantastic napping left hours of afternoon to fill with such delights as weeding the driveway at my parents' house, figuring out what math books to buy for school, and sitting around with no particular objective. Hurray for that.

We also were able to devote time to creating messes, generally food-based messes, and cleaning them up. Here you can seeMax getting familiar with a bowl of cherries, or maybe having just finished being a vampire. The day your toddler can reliably spit out the pits of fruit is a very, very happy day for a parent. Any time one more way that the baby can die because of your incompetence is crossed off the list, you feel like you have more time to devote to stuff like opening 6 months worth of mail or wearing clean clothes.

So we all lived through the summer, and even made it to Canada, a place so vacationey for Max that he continues to refer to good things as "Canada," as in "Hey Max, do you want to go outside and play baseball?" "Yeah, and we will be in Canada!" This nice association is probably because our stay included parties, baby goats, and Bill Friedman (who Max refers to as The Big Man) and Matt Garfunkel (known as Sofie's Dada or The Little Man). More on all this later.