rainy day (expanded)

It's raining, finally.

Jackson and Rylee are at vacation bible camp this week at Annunciation. It's one week, and it will culminate in a performance. Rome is the theme, and Jackson made an abacus on his first day.

The baseball season is over, and Rylee is wearing a soccer uniform Ariel gave to Jackson when she returned from Senegal. A trophy party is scheduled for this weekend for the team. Ry finished the season on his birthday playing centerfield again and got the very last bat of the season. He ran all the bases. Jack made some great plays in the field. He was the first at the beginning of the season to understand he could tag players out at the base. He was also the first to understand as the season progressed that he couldn't always outrun the baserunner and he needed to throw to the base for an out. He doesn't wait for the grounders. He goes to the ball, and when it's toward another fielder he knows to back that fielder up. I even saw him at the end of the season running from right field to back up the firstbaseman on throws to first.

Ry's fourth was celebrated twice. Once on the weekend with Nicholas at Elley and Don's house. (We grilled a very tasty salmon in foil.) On the actual day of his birthday, Cyndi and Jack had a little party in the morning and we had cake and ice cream that evening after the ball game. Presents were low key this year, but Ry loved every one of them.

We went bowling early one evening on the weekend. It was fun. The place was very nice and family friendly. Bumpers helped. Cyndi won. She was very happy about that. This was all in lieu of a Wii, which Nicholas showed the boys at his house.

Jackson had a piano lesson yesterday evening. Cyndi made tostados and the boys watched the usual fare on the Disney channel.

I think Ariel has found a place to live in Brooklyn, a 15-minute commute to Union Square and NYU via the metro, rooming with an editor for a national science magazine and a graduate student at Pratt in design. She takes the bedroom of a woman who just finished the program Ariel is enrolled in. It is in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, just across the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan (Greenwich Village, Soho, East Village, Little Italy and Chinatown; 3 1/2 miles from her door, across the bridge, to the door of the NYU journalism department on Cooper, not far from Washington Square).