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For our 30th wedding anniversary, we got his and hers lightweight rowing shells. They are different colors; but have the same twill pattern in the carbon fiber as our double. Very stylish in addition to being light and fast! We love having our own fleet. Having boats that fit has really added to the enjoyment of rowing and racing singles. And rowing individual boats more frequently has helped develop our rowing skills.

Our daughter got engaged to be married! Her husband-to-be is a great guy and will great addition to the family. The wedding is scheduled for early 2018 so we are already busy planning the ceremony and reception. Since is going to be a destination wedding, she held a pre-reception/party this summer for friends who would be unable to attend the actual wedding. It doesn’t seem that way to us; but she is actually older than we were when we got married.

We purchased a brand new “smart” vehicle as we continue to replace and upgraded things that were neglected during our many years of putting kids through high school and college. Our new SUV has among other things: multiple cameras that provide a virtual panoramic view from above the vehicle, forward and blind spot collision avoidance, automatic emergency braking, sonar to identify pedestrians and assist you when parking. And, of course, a wireless internet connection.

After last year’s dog debacle sidetracked us for a while, we finally got around to living the bourgeois life of no more tuition payments. This was our third season of rowing, and we expected to stick with it; so a lightly used double scull was our first purchase of something fun just for us. Much quicker and lighter-weight than the club boat we’d been using! And we love the twill pattern in the black carbon fiber, which looks almost like fish scales, as if the boat were a living creature.

Our daughter graduated in four years while playing soccer. Pretty good! Then she came home and somehow talked us into buying her the puppy she’d always wanted—not our finest moment. She had plans to move out in a week, but that did not happen; so what had been our quiet empty-nest house suddenly got much noisier with a yappy little dog in it! Looking on the bright side, our daughter gave some thought to the breed and chose one with a very friendly temperament that doesn’t shed.

We joined a rowing club this year and, after a Learn-to-Row course in the spring, rowed regularly in one of the club’s double sculls. Rowing is great exercise, and there’s plenty of wildlife along the river, such as herons and beavers. The only drawback is that rowing can cause blisters, especially if the oars are not the right size. So rather than take potluck with whatever club oars might be available on any given day, we decided to buy our own oars, now that we were getting close to the end of college expenses.

Because our daughter was making good progress in her nursing program and needed a reliable late-model vehicle to get to her clinicals (all those years of gallivanting in the Intrigue having taken their toll on it), we gave her the 2007 Acadia and bought the upgraded model, a 2012 Acadia Denali. Then we decided that we liked having a sunroof after all.

One of the advantages of traveling to all those college soccer games was that sometimes they were scheduled in balmy vacation spots. Florida in October generally is a lot more comfortable than Ohio! Our son outdid us in the warm-weather department in 2012, though, when he left for a semester abroad in Brazil in early January.

With both kids away at college in other cities, our house became very quiet! Although we still spent a lot of time on the road because our daughter had a soccer scholarship, we knew that the days of watching her play wouldn’t last forever.