After we put Connor on the stomach medicine, omeprazole, for another month, his tummy no longer bothers him. He does continue to feel something in his throat, and the need to clear his throat periodically.  Thus the doctor felt that it was worthwhile to do some blood tests and stool test to make sure there were no other issues.  So we took Connor in for the tests a couple of Saturday ago.  Connor was very nervous about the blood draw but he did well waiting for the extra 45 minutes despite having a lab appointment.  When the phlebotomist started helping him, Connor was actually quite chatty talking about how scared he was, but fortunately it went very well.  We had do a collection at home and so I brought that back few days later.  That drop off incidence was even worse; it was one of the most infuriating events as I had to wait 45 minutes just to drop off the sample.  At the end, we are very pleased that all of Connor’s tests came back with no issue.  Now the doctor just had Connor try allergy med in case the throat sensation is due to a postnasal drip.

     With the COVID pandemic, the cabana finally set up some safety precautions in June and we were able to start making reservations to have a swim.  Being in high demand, we had to watch for schedules closely to make our bookings, and we had a couple of weekends that we were not able to get in.  Then with the extreme heat in August, we had power outage then fires leading to poor air quality, many of our reserved days were cancelled.  For the past Labor Day weekend, we had another heat wave up to 107 degrees.  We were able to cool down with a swim on Saturday which was awesome.  On Labor’s Day as we were looking forward to another swim at 103 degrees, it was unfortunately cancelled at the last minute due to poor air quality.  We were definitely disappointed.

    Now the weather is cooling down and I can imagine that our swimming day is coming to an end soon.  We honestly did not get to swim as much as we had with the previous summers, however it has been really fun whenever we did make it there.  All four of us love the space we were given, a quarter of the pool.  We often bring all of our pool toys.  We played “kick the can”, “sharks with minnows” and “basketball” in the pool.  These games also allowed us to have good exercise swimming around too.  We could also took some action pictures in the pool without worrying about privacy with others.  All in all, we are very thankful to have this great entertainment during this crazy time.

      During the first week of school, we were in the heatwave; it was in the low 100 degrees several days in a roll.  We were told that there might be a potential rolling blackout.  On Saturday night while we were taking a walk later than usual (at 8 something), we saw the power went out on the street.  As it turned out, it was not a planned outage, it was a blown transformer.

   We had bought a generator awhile ago, and Stuart decided to put it in use then.  We set it up in the dark; it worked well to power the fridge back up.  But since it was noisy; we turned it off right before 11pm, so our neighbors would not hate us.  That night we slept downstairs as it was cooler but it was a very restless night.  At 6am when we were finally tired and in deep sleep, we heard the crazy loud thunder storm which we all know had caused major fires in CA we are still dealing with.

    By Sunday afternoon, we heard no real update on the power and we knew we had to go somewhere to cool down.  We discussed options; later we decided to go to a hotel especially since we wanted the boys to have internet for school the next day.  We found a decent hotel that would take Buddy too, so we quickly packed up and drove over.  There was a bad news when we arrived; it turned out that the hotel location was having a blackout the entire day but it was due to return.  After we dropped off our belongings in the room, we came back to the lobby as it was cooler.  Sitting there for the 15 to 20 minutes made me more worried about this decision and I started to wonder if we should change our plan to leave. At that moment, we received the best news that the power had returned.  I can’t describe how happy and relieved I was, and we all returned to the room to enjoy the AC.  The rest of the night, we had picked up dinner, played games and watched TV; we could finally relax.

     The next Monday the power in the house still had not returned.  We decided that I would go to work while Stuart and the boys stayed in the hotel.  As it turned out, Logan’s school was cancelled for the day since the school lost their power too.  In order to be fair, we let Connor off the day as well, so the two of them played in the room while Stuart tried to do some work.  Before lunch time we heard some improvement on the transformer issue but the power was not quite back yet. I came during lunch break to help the family check out and we all went home. After I left them at home later to return to work, according to Stuart, the house was getting more and more intolerably hot in the afternoon.  Finally the good news came at 4pm and the power was back.  It took quite awhile and a lot out of our AC, the house eventually cooled down, and our home is back to our comfortable place.

     The decision was made to do distance learning for the first few weeks of this school year.  We were not really mentally ready for the school to start, but over the last weekend before school start, we did try to do some preparation.  We had the boys cleaned up their rooms and their desks.  We bought them both a laptop stand.  Also during that week, they each had their school pick up time; they brought home textbooks and some school supplies. The schools were doing last minute preparati

     Toward the end of the summer, we wanted to encourage the kids to do more activities, thus we bought them a new 4 square ball.  They did get into it the first week, and often wanted to go to the school playground to play.  They do prefer to play 4 players instead of 2 players, so Stuart and I tried to join them when we could.   Last week we were in a heatwave, then fires and bad air quality issue, thus we had not played for awhile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDwlU6D6EJI