Five Brown Kids

Blythe is taking a tap/ballet dance class. Little dancers are the cutest!! Also snapped this picture of Blythe skipping into preschool. Yay!

Oh man. This wicked hurricane was headed right over Raleigh when we first started hearing about it. People went crazy buying water and gas. And we doubled checked our flashlights and candles. When it finally showed up it did a nice loop around us and left us unscathed. Flooded like crazy south and east of us though and many people are hurting. Kids had no school on Thursday and Friday and Monday. Taye had lots of friends over. It did rain a lot- but nothing more than we could handle.

East Carolina University Swim and Dive invited Taye for a recruiting weekend.  He had such a fun time!  Friday morning I stayed for a Q&A with the head coach, an information session with the head athletic academic advisor (freshmen athletes have to log into the athlete's study hall 10 hours a week) and a tour of the athletic facilities and the rest of campus.  Then recruits and coaches went out for lunch at Bad Daddy's, watched a swim practice and met other swimmers, went to the coach's house for a BBQ, then stayed overnight in the dorms with a freshman swimmer from Sweden (who was really cool!). Saturday they did swim practice, a football tailgate lunch, football game and then hanging out with swim team friends, checking out downtown, eating pizza and all other good stuff. I picked him up Sunday after breakfast.   Taye is super excited about it all - I hope it works out.

Our next door neighbors invited us to their beach house for the labor day weekend.  We went last year too!  Taye stayed home with friends but the rest of us had a great time.  Jaxon and I did a lot of wave jumping each morning but the best thing was this tidal pool that rolled in each day just around lunch time.  After that we couldn't leave.  It was maybe a foot and a half deep and perfect for digging, rolling around and surfing for Blythe without the worry of big waves.  The kids spent hours and hours in the tide pool.  Mark and Deb cooked dinners for us and took us four wheeling on a drivable part of the beach.  They are great hosts and the best neighbors - always keeping an eye on the comings and goings at our house and they are interested in me and my family.  We are so lucky. Jaxon is really happy at the beach and watching him totally zone out in this tide pool made me really happy too. Tyrone was worried he was going to fal...