late summer

I hope late summer finds you well. It's been pretty hot around here, but we've gotten outdoors quite a bit regardless.

Ollie was very pleased to discover that he could climb the pussywillow "tree" in our backyard.

Watering the potatoes.

"Going to Chicago on our red-barrel mobile"

Lately, Oli*ver has forsaken his Reader's Digest Guide to Home Improvement for this book.

No*ah talking to Omie on the phone to tell her his tooth was loose.

He lost it the next day. Very exciting around here!

Our new "ladies", who are doing quite well. We hope they start laying at the end of September before they molt.

We've been having some talks about what will probably not be OK on the playground at school...

This past Saturday, Jo*el and I slept in until 9 AM. No*ah was upstairs drawing and reading and this guy was building...

It’s been a good summer, with lots of family time. We went to New York, camping once just the four of us and once with friends, the boys went camping with Jo*el, and we’re all going to a cabin on the edge of the Boundary Waters in a couple of weeks. The boys have done VBS as well as a couple of great little camps at our favorite nature center, and they’re in a Music Tog*ether camp this week. In 3 weeks, they start Kindergarten, which is still a little hard to imagine. They’re ready, both academically and socially, but it’s a big transition. They’re mostly excited and a bit nervous as well.

The boys are at a lovely stage where they take pride in and even compete at being helpful, bringing in groceries, helping with peeling and even cutting and cooking up veggies and putting things away. They have bad days, but mostly, they’re really pretty good, loving, and pleasant to be with. They sit nicely in church with me now after a somewhat rocky transition out of the nursery this Spring. And I love all their nutty “inventions”, their games and their stories. They ask such wonderful questions, and their observations blow me away.

Of course, they do still need some re-directing at times. I was straightening up in the living room a few days ago when I saw something go sailing by outside, with lots of giggling to follow. I looked more closely through the window and was somewhat mortified to discover that their earlier experiments with a fork and a screw at the kitchen table had lead to the full-on discovery of the catapult, complete with boards and rocks. I went outside and gave a rather stern and emphatic lecture about the importance of using non-rock-like object for one’s catapulting, and the possible consequences of using rocks near roads, people, and windows. A little later, No*ah came in and said he had a theory: If a little person stood on one end of a board over a big rock and a big person jumped on the other end, would the little person go flying through the air? I told him that would depend – on just how much heavier the big person was, if the board didn’t break, and so on. No*ah went back outside, and a little later, I saw him dragging a larger board from the backyard to the front. The front door opened and he asked, “Mama, would you step outside?” Umm, no….

So yesterday, we found a large number of yellow cukes in the garden, as there seem to be about 20 minutes in between tiny-gherkin size and big-fat-over-ripe size lately. I did a lot of garden work on this cooler, drier day than we’d had in some time, but most enjoyable was helping the boys catapult the cucumbers into the compost pile from 15 or so feet away.