back to school etc. 2015

After the challenges of last August / September of moving out of rental but our new house not being ready until November, it was nice to have a calm, uneventful start to the school year (for the girls and for me).  Well, I made it a bit more eventful by getting laser eye surgery on the girls' first day of school.  So I'm glasses-free, but I can't see very well at night yet (temporary side effect).  Thus, my tennis game has not been great, as I mostly play at night this time of year (i.e. all year except the summer).

ORBJ started in Ladybirds, the Irish version of Girl Scouts (or the equivalent for kindergarteners).  She was SO ready to join, as illustrated here:

Big sister escorting her little sister to her first day of ladybirds

FABJ still enjoys Brownies.  They are different branches, which LBJ says is a good thing to give them some separation.  It's tough to beat ORBJs location - 5 minute walk if that.

The cat has been pretty entertaining.  Except when she jumps on me in the middle of the night and wakes me up.  For some reason she doesn't do that to LBJ...

cat in a shopping (not in a hat)

Once we started back to school, we starting thinking about FABJ's birthday party.  Even though her birthday is in August, we have the party in September once she's back in school (first day of school is September 1st or a day or two before). As expected, LBJ made another impressive cake - a pirate ship:

Ahoy, mateys!  Thar be birthday cake (pirate booty?)

The other hit of the party was the pinata, although the thing took FOREVER to break (even though some of LBJs friends gave it some impressive, solid THWACKS - a technical term, I know).  (My apologies for no pictures of the pinata, and for not knowing to type the 'n' with the ~ on top.)

We had great weather and the girls had a great time.

Next posting is for October 2015, including our trip to Paris for the Bank Holiday weekend.