what's up weekly.

Celebrate good times, COME ON!  It's a celebration!  (Because what Friday ISN'T a celebration, amiright?  You know I'm right.)

Rocco celebrated by showing off his one-armed pushups.  Juni was mightily impressed.

Atticus turned twelve-and-a-half on Saturday.  We are on the downhill slide toward teenagerhood.  This next phase is going to be SO FUN!

Not to be outdone, outshone, or outgrown, Rocco also hit a milestone this week: he lost his first tooth!  He named it Bob the Doctor.  (I didn't clarify if that means it is a real doctor, or more like a Dr. Jill.)

Todd took him outside for some senior photos to commemorate this step into adulthood.  This sultry look is called, "My sister and I are both staring my future in the face, and are unsure of what it holds for me."

This one's called, "Psych! We're both optimists."

I pulled a Ma and made jam.  Oven-roasted jam.  It is so good I have been known to eat it from the jar like sticky soup.  Unfortunately, it turns out jamming is a lot of work, and these two cafeteria-sized sheet pans turned into only two pints of soup jam.  And you know how I feel about high-investment, low-reward activities: I don't like them.  So it looks like my canning efforts maxed out at two pints this year.  WHICH IS TWO PINTS MORE THAN I CANNED LAST YEAR, so that's like a 200% increase in pints, and I like to think of that as a win!

This little girl gang was thick as thieves again this week.

Because the weather was so beautiful, because the kids are able to prepare their own 'picnic' lunches now and nothing depends on me doing extra work, and because our backyard is still torn up, the kids have been having lunch time picnics out on the front lawn many days.

And in "News That I Wish Wasn't News," here is the newest member of the VV clan:

I am hopeful that he isn't long for this world.

And in more News That I Wish Wasn't News, I'm off to go look up how to get rid of a cyst without a professional's help.  I have a cyst on my chest that I've been ignoring since early 2020, but it is getting so large that I'm pretty sure I only have a few days before it sprouts a face and classifies as a second head.  Wish me luck.