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Jeff got the same vendor seats we had earlier this summer for today's Red Sox/Yankees game at Fenway. When he got the tickets a few days ago, he remembered he'd promised Summer he'd take her to a Lowell Spinners game, so he drove up to Lowell to buy tickets. The only game available was tonight's. So Jeff made his own double header with his two best girls. Here we are at Fenway, and here's Summer with the Canaligator. There are worse ways to spend a Monday.
Charlie's physical therapist Mary has discharged him. We walked to the playground and she watched him climb all the way up the structure and then slide down the big slide by himself, probably a year earlier than Summer even tried that. She watched him pick up a little plastic barette in a neat pincer grip. She says he holds his head perfectly straight 70% of the time, and she expects that number to keep going up. If I am ever unhappy with his progress, I can always call her back in. We hugged in my driveway.
Mary has been working with us twice a month since Charlie was two months old. She has always acted in a very professional manner, but at the same time I feel like she's part of our family. She's the one who first bothered to sit him up by himself on Halloween last year when he was exactly six months old--look, he can do it! 
She's the one who found his first teeth on the top because I was only feeling his bottom gums. At every visit, she spent time engaging Summer as well as Charlie, and she shared anecdotes about her own kids' experience in our town's public schools that underscored my desire to never leave, even though the property taxes make us feel like chumps for staying. She is the source of one of Charlie's only two barley-free nicknames: Bud-Bud. (The other, of course, is Mr. Man.)
I'm proud that Charlie has done so well that he no longer needs PT, but I'm really going to miss the captain of Charlie's cheering section.
I am afraid I will fall behind eternally if I attempt to blog our European vacation, so I think I'll just try to stay relatively current and then sneak in some vacation stuff every once in a while.
We spent this past weekend at Storyland in Glen, NH with the fantabulous Flynn family. I highly recommend Storyland. It costs $22 a person, and if you come after 3:00 you can go back the next day for free. Summer met Cinderella and we rode the log flume six times.
Then we drove up the Mt. Washington Auto Road. 
The summit of Mt. Washington is home to the worst recorded weather in the world. At the bottom it was 75 degrees and sunny; at the top it was 40 degrees with hurricane-force winds. Even in a car (and yes they gave us the bumper sticker), even in August, Mt. Washington will KICK YOUR ASS. However, it was clear, which is unusual; Mt. Washington is fogged-in 300 days a year. Summer could see all the way to Canaga.
The best thing about our vacation was that we were with a family--John's family. John's sister Britta was the baby. She remembers things that John has forgotten on purpose or that he never knew.
This is the farm where John spent his boyhood. The people who live there now tore down the house and built a modern one, but they saved the old entryway as a shed.
Here are Britta, Summer, John and my mom with Aunt Ellie, 84, who, as a teenager walking little John home from school, threw her body over his in a ditch as the Russians bombed the bridge near their farm.
John and his family have been through some seriously harrowing shit that I am not going to get into on the Internet. So it's kind of odd that you'd have trouble finding a more cheerful and pleasant cohort. They follow the motto inscribed on a ceramic plaque that Britta gave me for a gift: "Lycka ar, att minnas gardagen, dromma om morgondagen, och att leva idag." It means "Happiness is remembering yesterday, dreaming of tomorrow, and living today."
If you ask Summer what she liked best about the trip, she says "Making new friends in Finland." Her new friends are Britta's amazing 10-year-old twin grandchildren, Peter and Janina. They speak Swedish because of their father, Spanish because of their mother, English because it is the common language of their parents, Portuguese because until a year ago they lived in Brazil, and now they're learning Finnish in school. Summer picked berries with Peter and Janina, tried the sauna with them, slept in a tent next to the water with them. She loved every minute of it.
One of Jeff's favorite parts of the trip was fishing with Britta's son Tage (pronounced Tar-gay). Jeff caught a pike. Tage caught the second biggest pike he'd ever caught. Tage also helped Charlie drive the tractor, and, when we left Finland, gave Jeff a 350-year-old key from one of his farm buildings. I enjoyed the company of Tage's wife Lorena. Even though we'd never met, we connected to the point of communicating via eyebrows across the dinner table.
As for Charlie, he discovered a passion for sweeping. Outdoors, indoors, in a restaurant, in a historical park, wherever he could find a broom, he swept.
No one else could have the vacation we had, because of the people who so generously hosted and fed us and shared with us what real life is like in Finland. We'll never forget it. 
