{cricket chirp...cricket chirp}

This summer, especially this month, has been a blur.  It's the end of August already and we have hardly even started shopping for back to school supplies and clothes!  Finn keeps asking me to sign him up for preschool (our once a week ECFE program) and is insistent that he needs a backpack.  He told me this morning he also needs to bring a lunch to preschool (he does not).  We've been away from our house (and our Uriah) more this month than we've been together, although we did get a mini-family-vaca last weekend.  And a whole, uninterrupted 24 hours with Uriah to swim and boat and build sandcastles together.

Summer weather has finally hit the north shore and it is hot and humid and I have fans everywhere and windows open wide in a vain attempt to get a cross breeze blowing through our house.  These are the two weeks of summer that I wish for an air conditioner.  I know that this too shall pass and I wish I could bottle up this heat so that in January I can remember the smell of humid grass in the early morning and clouds heavy with raindrops that do not fall.  In the meantime we are meeting some friends for a picnic and some swimming...a fun way to cool down.

And then we will pack up and leave again tomorrow.

Oh, summer...our love affair is fleeting.

A family obsessed.

A few weeks ago I brought home a fire pit.  

Uriah and I had been talking about getting one pretty much all summer, although Uriah was convinced that he could make one for us out of bricks and crap he was going to buy at Home Depot.  With the loads of spare time he has in the summer, I was certain it would be 20 summers from now by the time the awesome fire pit of his dreams was complete, so when I found one on clearance at the ShopKo, I popped on it. 

We have been obsessed ever since.  We have a fire as often as we can - weather and wood permitting - and I 've been loading my kids up on s'mores, because I think s'mores are the official bed time snack of summer.  Most nights we have our bed time snack around the fire pit (grahams, mallows, chocolate...what an awesome way to go to bed!  Last night we experimented with Rolos and the metly-caramel/hot marshmallow combo was amazing!) and then Uriah and I sit outside and have grown up time until the embers are glowing and the mosquitoes force us inside.

We should have done this a long time ago...