What's New, Bullet-Style

• Last Friday afternoon, Jason and I sat in a title office and signed closing papers and a big, horrible check to finally sell our South Haven house.  It is hard to know how to describe the way it feels to sell a house that was the first big thing we owned together and to which we brought home baby Annie from the hospital.  It is also hard to know how to feel about the fact that it took nearly SIX YEARS on the market and us bringing an amount of money to the table that would buy a used car for that thing to finally sell.  I'll go with . . . bizarre.  Surreal.  We came home and drank champagne, toasting to "one mortgage!"  
• Jemma, as I previously mentioned, taught herself to swim.  Early last week, she was still getting a snootful of water every time she tried to remember how to "hum" underwater to blow bubbles.  Today, during the minutes when she wasn't asking (at 4:00) if we could "eat lunch soon," and during the minutes when she wasn't being irrationally weepy about the tiniest boo-boo ever on her big toe, she was swimming half the length of the kid's pool underwater, popping up every single time and looking at me with big eyeballs through her goggles.  "Mom!  Did you see THAT?"  I definitely did, little fishie.
• Jemma also taught herself to whistle, which she now does at every possible opportunity, including in church.  It is almost too cute to tell her to stop.
• Annie and I spent an hour this afternoon going through the giant pile of crap she brought home from school in those last few days.  My favorite things are her artwork and an entry she wrote in her journal about her parents.  It ends, "I was the first baby that they ever had."  
• Michigan strawberries are at the farmer's market!  (And in my tummy!)  Time to make shortcake.
• I began the day at 6:15 a.m. with yoga class outside at Reed's Lake.  It was a clear, cool morning, and doing sun salutations facing the rising sun with the grass under my mat felt like being on vacation.
• Our fish Priscilla died.  What?  I never mentioned a fish before?  That's because we'd only had her for about a month, ever since the day Jason and Annie came home from the Science on Saturdays program I'd signed them up for - with a fish!  There was NO MENTION of a fish in the promotional materials.  And yet there she was, in her clear Tupperware container which would remain her home forever, until we flushed her down the toilet this morning.  Is there any child, anywhere, who does not have a memory of flushing a goldfish down the toilet while they cry a little?  RIP, Priscilla.  You were a spunky goldfish on our kitchen counter for nearly five weeks.