Glamour Girl...in Glasses!

Saturday was Julia's eye exam. The eye doctor couldn't make a good determination after the initial testing so she had to dilate her eyes. That burned Julia's eyes at first but she was a champ letting them put in the drops and adjusted well after. The girls were paranoid that this twist in events was going to jeopardize their seeing "Monster's University" with Grandma later, but Julia did well and took a short nap that afternoon so we were able to go that evening. The theater was packed so Jared sat alone, the girls sat with Grandma, and Jeremy and I sat together (although Julia came to sit on my lap at some point and stayed there the rest of the movie).

She looks so grown up. 

Anyway. Back to the eye exam. We learned that Julia is farsighted, the opposite of Jared, who is nearsighted. I'm glad that we've caught this fairly early as Jared was ending second grade before his teacher mentioned that he didn't seem to see the board very well. I had never noticed and felt bad when I realized the poor child was practically blind (seriously at his last eye exam, I could nearly contain my astonishment when he was reading the letters on the chart - and got NONE of them right). I feel like the trouble Julia has been having with learning to read and learning her numbers, and keeping focused, is likely attributed at least in part to this (she had a bit of trouble last week with 12 and 21 while working with Sam - makes sense if she can't see very well). I'm hopeful once she gets her glasses that we'll see more improvement. Speaking of glasses, she picked these out and isn't she the cutest thing ever? We'll get them in a couple of weeks.

Adorable!

To start out, she'll only need to wear them for reading, writing, school work, computer, etc. That will be nice not to have to worry about them when she's playing or swimming. She'll be reevaluated in October and we'll see if she has to move to full-time then.

Side note, before the eye exam I whipped out my first-ever french braid, in just a matter of minutes too. I've tried a time or two with the girls but it never ended well. I may never be able to do it again, but I was rather proud of my braid. :-)

Julia had her last game Tuesday night. I think she had a lot of fun this year but was also ready to be done. Here she is receiving her medal from Coach Feeney:

Turns out that her team played Jake Bohon's team that night (and her friend Ella Seedorf's) and I snapped a quick shot of these two cousins:

Jake and Julia after sharing the field for their last game.

After Julia's game, I finally got Jenna to the batting cages. She's wanted to try them for a while now. It took her a few swings to catch on and warm up, but then she was hitting them fairly consistently. We also watched some of the big kids play for a while, so it was a late night for us (Jeremy working out of town again). The next night Jenna had a make-up game and is done now except for tournament play. I let Jenna do the batting cages again a couple of times before we headed home. It was a pretty hot night but Grandma Bea came to the game which was really sweet. I helped her get her lawn chair to the field and we actually got her a spot under a shade tree that had a pretty good breeze. She stayed the whole game; Grandma and Grandpa were there too. Dad had missed Jenna's game on Monday and I'd gotten the following text from him: 

"Jenna I was mowing and forgot your game...I'm sorry...see your game Wednesday..." I thought that was pretty cute. Dad was always good about pitching to Jenna when she was younger and he really is a great fan of hers. He is signing her up for a theater camp in July at Maples Repertory Theater in Macon that he thought would be a good confidence-builder. 

Yesterday we found out that we had a small leak in the gas water heater and that it wasn't venting properly. Jeremy kept saying he smelled something when someone was in a hot shower so we called the gas company to check it out. Luckily they were pretty easy fixes; since our new water heater is taller than our old one, one of the venting pipes was parallel instead of slanting upwards. Jeremy got that taken care of yesterday, and thankfully the man who came to check it out said it wasn't significant enough of a carbon monoxide leak to have affected us in the house. 

Today Jared is going swimming with his friend Ian and spending the night with him. Our weekend is shaping up rather nicely as AUNT TIFFY AND DD will be here tomorrow! The kids are SO excited, and they don't know that DD is getting to come after all, as at first he was going to have to work. I've almost slipped up a time or two but luckily so far I've kept the secret. Last night Jeremy asked, with all the kids in the room, when Tiffy would get here and I said "They're leaving Saturday morning as far as I know." He cabbaged on to that right away. "They?" So I just blew it off with a wave of my hand and shake of my head and said, "She." No one seemed to think much of it as we're used to referring to Tiffy and DD as a unit. Then I put on Jenna and Jared's chore list for today to "get rooms ready for company." Jared said "Why do I have to get my room ready?" Forgetting that he didn't know DD would be in there next week I just said, "Well you know, Aunt Tiffy's coming and I want the house to be neat." He didn't seem to think much of that either so I'm good so far. I just need to get through one more day. 

Next week will be full of swimming, BBQs, movies, a salon day for me and Mom and Tiff, 4th of July celebrating, plus a couple of doctor appointments thrown in there, and Julia will make sure Aunt Tiffy paints her and Jenna's nails per tradition. I have the whole week off - Yay! Plus, I finally ordered a new computer to replace our 10-year-old beast that has an archaic floppy disk drive. It's completely wearing down to the point that out of desperation I uninstalled everything I thought I didn't need in an effort to make more space. I inadvertently uninstalled my Microsoft Office, and I use excel to track the business income and expenses. I thought, no big deal, I'll just re-install from my disk - but the CD drive won't even open. I thought I had lost my entire spreadsheet with half a year's work on it, but luckily, even though I couldn't open it at home, I could email it to myself at work and open it there (Hallelujah!). So with a little guidance from Tiffy's friend Mike, my new system should arrive next week. I also ordered a device that is supposed to transfer video from my old video camera to the computer where I can burn them onto DVD. I hope that works as expected so we can preserve all those videos we took of the kids when they were babies, something I've wanted to do for a long time but didn't have the technology for (yay for getting a PC with an actual DVD/CD  burner!)

Finishing up with a pic of Jeremy using the new grill for the first time - we had delicious hamburgers and sliced potatoes!