Chris and I are leaving on a kid-free holiday next week, so naturally the boys came down with colds this week (and have now passed their germs to me). There’s been lots of sneezing, coughing and wiping of noses, but at least everyone’s sleeping all right. We were on a pretty good run of no illness in the house all summer, but that streak has come to an end — and with Justin in preschool, I’m sure we’ll have all kinds of new germs going around.

Brayden has his own version of a bunch of different words now, although no one but us would be able to identify them (most of them are animal sounds anyway, although he can also imitate the honking of a car horn and the “vroom vroom” sound). He has even said “mama” occasionally like he really means it. He has an appointment with the speech pathologist next week but he has made significant progress in the last two weeks, so I’m not really worried. Justin was a late talker but an early reader, so hey. All in due course…