Busy week ahead! I've got lots of client work this week, and worked a good part of the weekend prepping for this week. It was so good to have Greg home to help with the kids (plus, he helped me create some smoking graphs that I wouldn't have come up with on my own -- that's a husband worth keeping!)

I guess it'll be worth it when I invoice at the end of the week. But it's definately busy. Strangely, even though I don't have regular babysitting help yet (my summer sitter is on vacation) it still seems easier than during the school year just because of the flexibility of time and not being on such a strict schedule. And the kids are getting old enough to play by themselves together nicely most of the time, so it isn't the same level of constant supervision that they've needed in past summers. On the schedule for the busy week:

• Two full day of meetings. I know that going in to the office for 2 full days isn't a big deal for most people, but it is when you don't have child care. I'm set up to work from home, not an office. Luckily, our favorite babysitter is available this week and will stick with the kids for the two days while I'm at meetings.
• Start of summer soccer. We're starting in a new league -- Cook Inlet Soccer. We'll see how it goes. The time of games/practices is much more manageable (5:30 pm) than the old league, which had some games that started at 8:00 p.m. Getting hot, sweaty kids home at 9:30 pm is just too late.
• Start of summer swimming. The kids are swimming 2 nights a week during June. They're both really close to pushing through to the next "level" of swimming so I'm hoping that they'll benefit from not having such a long summer break from the pool.
• Remodeling Cate's bedroom. I was talking to a friend about wanting to get Cate out of her toddler bed. It's a car bed -- cool, but just too small. She needs a bigger girl bed. The friend was getting rid of a captain style bed for their son because they want something that could handle box springs. They offered to give us the bed and the fairly new mattress. We'll paint it a color that Cate can pick out and add some princess nettings above the bed for a canopy, and maybe a few other things to make it worthwhile to give up the car bed. It'll be some work, but hopefully it'll be worth it. We'll pick out some paint hopefully later this evening.

In general, though, the summer is going well. We've had lots of playdates. At one point I told Greg that I wanted our house to be a neighborhood center of activity where the kids would all want to congregate here. It seems we're achieving that. Christopher has been riding bikes, and we've been reading like crazy. Just finished "Goblet of Fire" the 4th Harry Potter book with Christopher. It's over 700 pages, just that one book. He's insatiable. He begged to go to the book store for "Order of the Phoenix" today -- we'll get started on it this evening.