The Last Few Weeks

The pond definitely gets quieter during the last few weeks of August. It's generally pretty quiet anyway - unless you get some unruly people teeing golf balls of their neighbor's dock. Especially when the first shot is more like a line drive and smashes a beer bottle sitting innocently in its path. Not that I have any personal knowledge of this. Moving on.

She's a cautious diver but she's a diver nonetheless.
The pond is one of the great equalizers in their relationship. It's one of the spots where they get along much more than they bicker. There are races (where the boy has learned the fine art of counting super fast during his sister's headstart), handstand contests and frog catching expeditions. Truly, I know I'm blessed to live here.

If I ever post here about moving to anywhere that is more than thirty minutes to the ocean...slap me. And quite frankly, thirty minutes is about twenty eight minutes too long.
South Shore Beach, Little Compton, Rhode Island. Voted the best. beach. ever. by my children.
Boogie Boardable waves, skim boardable skim, rock jetty walls to explore, crabs to hunt and soft white sand. Perfection.

The view (a partially smokey one) of our campsite at Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire. The campground was virtually empty - leaving my kids free reign to run wild through thirty or so campsites all around us. It's a beautiful park, tons of trails, letter boxes - it was six miles from the main gate to our campsite - truly a HUGE place. Huge. Much like the mosquito population. I've never quite experienced mosquitos swarming us like they did - literally there would be ten to fifteen mosquitos around me and the camp stove as I cooked - disgusting. My poor girl had the welts to prove it.


The lake was beautiful but a mite bit c-c-c-cold. Still, it was refreshing and blessedly mosquito free. There was some sort of naturey pond exploration class one morning and my two little cherubs were waiting at the gate for the volunteer girl. They were the only ones to show up for the class and spent every minute they could catching diving beetles, butterflies and frogs. Later, the same girl took them on a survival hike while I did laundry and washed dishes (oh the fun of camping - where menial tasks take three times as long!). They built a shelter and learned four different ways to build a fire.

What does a mom do when she takes her kids camping and wakes up to a rainy morning? She packs the kids up, throws her mandated 'wait until you're thirteen' rule out the window and gets her daughter's ears pierced.

And here, the first day of school. I got the usual canned smile shot of the girl. And then I asked her how she really felt about school starting.

Here's my son's answer to the same question.


Summer vacation. I thought eleven weeks was going to be too long. Turns out it wasn't nearly long enough.