Here are a few things we've been doing as Summer draws to a close (waaah!). We had a great lightning storm one night. I love lightning storms, especially in summer, and always feel disappointed if we go through August and September without having a bunch of them. [You can click any of these pictures to make them bigger, you know, if you want to.]
People on the porch—watching one of the aforementioned storms. And just matching in yellow.
Ziggy snuggling with Nutmeg. They both seemed fairly pleased about the situation.
Seb's drone (he got it several years ago for Christmas) only flies for about 5 minutes before you have to change the battery, but oh boy is it exciting while it lasts!
These pictures were from a day we were learning about glaciers, so we got some ice blocks and took them to a nearby hill and learned about terminal and lateral moraines, and glacial till, and compaction, and U-shaped valleys, and pressure melting, and so forth. And we also had quite a bit of fun riding the ice blocks down the hill, of course. :)
Ziggy turned two! He continues to get cuter all the time. He talks CONSTANTLY (it's exhausting) along with repeating pretty much everything anyone else says, in his own little jumbled way. He asks Malachi for a "pig-gy-back-ride" just about every day, he sings "Happy BIRTHday to ZEKey!" in the loudest voice ever (followed by puffing at a non-existent candle and then saying "Hav-a cake?"), and he is very reliable at USING the toilet but not reliable at all at putting his underpants back on, so he is very often running around bare-bottomed or at least pants-less. He thinks he knows everything and he thinks he owns the place. And perhaps he's right.
Teddy continues to draw bunnies on every scrap of paper he can get his hands on (only a few on walls so far, luckily…) which is just the cutest. It doesn't hurt that he has the most handsome pet bunny for inspiration. This middle picture shows more of Nutmeg's white tummy than he would probably want you to see. When he lies down (you know bunnies can't really lie down smoothly, so they
FLOP over all at once), he sometimes OVERflops and rolls all the way onto his back so his tummy shows. After this happens he always seems a little embarrassed and adjusts himself into a more seemly position. But I love his little white tummy so I'm always happy to get a glimpse of it. :)
We went raspberry picking and came home with 22 pounds of raspberries, which seemed like it would last forever! The people at the farm said it was the most anyone had picked all summer, though, to be fair, we did have an awful lot of people contributing to that total (seven of us went to pick that day). Sadly, the 22 pounds went VERY quickly. Let's see, we made two (admittedly huge) batches of raspberry-white chocolate muffins. One raspberry pie. Several rounds of raspberry shakes. They topped one breakfast's-worth of steel cut oats. And we had them once on crepes and twice on waffles (accompanied by fresh peaches). But they were still gone far too fast and we wished for more! The girls saw a pretty yellow grasshopper at the raspberry patch, which I've never seen before!
The girls and Teddy have been busy building things lately. I like to see them loving the blocks as much as the
big boys used to!
My little twins continue to love twinning. Daisy got to go with my mom to Seattle for a few days, and afterwards she and Junie were SO HAPPY to be reunited again! To celebrate, they wore exactly matching clothes, down to their underwear, for the next week. This last picture is not of the two of them, however, but just of Junie before and after her braces came off. (Just "stage 1," unfortunately, but if you previously differentiated Daisy and Junie by one having braces and one NOT having braces, you are now out of luck.)
Seb continues to love running cross-country and to impress me with how cheerfully and diligently he can work at a hard thing when he is self-motivated to do so! :) I love watching him race even as I simultaneously feel all the sick, nervous feelings from my own past cross-country races coming back. He doesn't seem to get as nervous as I did—or maybe he just doesn't show it. At one of his recent meets, the varsity team was running a different race, so Seb got to run varsity. He looked SO HAPPY afterwards. After I took this picture of his team, I just kept staring at his smile in it, feeling amazed. Sometimes it's pretty cool to watch your kids grow up!
Teddy still likes to play "UPS Man" frequently. He's also (through Seb) becoming an expert on drumming and "drumsets," which can be…loud. They haven't ruined anything in the house. Yet. But Seb did make Teddy a quite lovely marching tom-tom out of a flour bucket and tape. I used to play the drums myself, you know, so I can't quite bring myself to put a stop to it. (Assuming I even COULD put a stop to it, which is doubtful.)
We had a wild hailstorm last week. Abe was driving us home from a field trip to the planetarium and we saw it approaching as we drove, and it looked quite apocalyptic! Then once we entered the storm, it was DEAFENING on the car and kind of scary. The hailstones stayed small enough not to damage anything, luckily (when I was about 10 we had a summer hailstorm with golf-ball-sized hail, and everyone's cars and roofs were ruined!). Fierce weather is always kind of exciting, though. It left an inch of hail on the grass and even on the sidewalks and streets, which I have rarely seen before. Daisy made a cute little "hailman" out of the hail, before it melted.
