At the beginning of the summer we made a plan to go to the beach every Tuesday afternoon with the kids. I’d go into work at around 6am and get off at 2:30, and we’d zip down to the Balboa penninsula before rush hour traffic could pick up. We’d at Ruby’s on the pier and build sand walls for a while until the sun was too low in the sky to offset the chillfactor of the breeze.

We did this three or four times, but with the new house and some projects at work, the busyness factor was stepped up too high to make that committment. We’ve been going to local friends houses with pools instead, and they’ve done nicely. Abel and Espen learned to swim a few weeks ago, and I can take them on submarine rides a few feet underwater without any panic.

Abel had his birthday, but hasn’t followed through on any of the things that we’d been telling him 3-year olds were capable of doing. Well, really the one thing was leaving diapers behind. Oh well. History shows that at this age, developmental lag isn’t particularly significant. Here’s the annual “kid-in-a-suitcase” picture of Abel:

And here’s the older monkey-viking:

Speaking of lag, I’ve lagged in my fatherly storytelling duty at pretty much the rate that I’ve lagged at blogging. The last several months have had our heroes Little Boy Named Espen, Ness Teague, and their assorted sidekicks trapped in the land of the dog-soldiers. They were taken there inside a giant wooden ball via tornado and have been helping Beowoof, a clan chieftain, deal with a horrible dinosaurine catbeast, the Meeshtah. In retrospect, it must have been Doug TenNapel’s Creature Tech that inspired the denouement, the angel Gabriel loaned Beowoof a flaming sword with which to dispatch the fiendish feline.

I really need to write about all that’s involved in beginning the journey to renovate a house, our plans for interim housing, etc. Maybe it will come this week.