SEPTEMBER!

I was sweeping the kitchen yesterday morning (I know! Miracle, right??), and I noticed that I still have last fall's butternut and acorn squashes sitting in a basket in the pantry. I started to throw them away, but then I literally thought - hey, tomorrow is September! I wonder if it's too soon to put up fall decorations, because these squashes would be perfect... That's right, folks. I'm keeping squashes that are a year old in the hopes that one of these weeks, it'll start feeling like fall, and I'll get them out and place them on the mantle, and they'll be beautiful and I'll probably be asked to do a magazine cover as a result.

Maybe the heat is getting to me?

Nevertheless, it IS September! And Luke is on his second week of school, which is wonderful for all of us, and Sarah and Andrew will start preschool next week, which is even more wonderful for all of us, and I think that just maybe, MAYBE, I've survived another brutal end-of-summer!

Don't get me wrong, I love summer. And I actually really like warm weather and would take it over cold weather almost any day. Unless that day is in August, in which case I'd happily fly to the North Pole on a moment's notice. But warm weather - HOT weather - is especially tricky, I'm learning, when you have young'uns. The weather heats up to that point where it never gets lower than 90, even in the dead of night, and you can't go outside without sweating and burning immediately, and the heat literally reaches its hand down and pushes you forcefully back into any air-conditioned space, and then that space is Heaven and Bliss until you've spent several days there and then several weeks hardly ever leaving that space and suddenly your nice, comfortable home is a prison in which you must co-habitate with three cranky, bouncy, small-but-loud humans.

Not that I would know anything about that...

I was initially pretty proud of my planning for the summer. It just so happened that All the Summer Stuff would be done by mid-July. If you're counting, that's two birthday parties, one major family reunion, two grandparents' camps, one beach vacation, a girls' weekend in Pennsylvania, and swimming lessons. (Some day I'll laugh about how small that list is, but trust me when I tell you it was exhausting. And wonderful.) By the end of July, we'd finally put away our suitcases and travel toothbrushes with a vow to never get them out again, and the lazy days of summer were finally setting in.

Oh, the memories I have of summer as a kid.... swimming pools and popsicles, building a lean-to in the forest behind our house, riding bikes to the Minute Mart, working on puzzles, reading books, watching CHiPs...

But at this point in life, the "lazy days" more closely resemble this:



(And incidentally, they include numerous family viewings of Muppets movies, among other things.)

Some day, my kids will be able to ride bikes on their own for more than 10 minutes at a time, and every trip outside won't involve sunscreen and wardrobe changes and where are the shoes and do we need five bottles of water and let's check for wasps before you play in the treehouse today. But until that magical day, we will survive on PBS Kids and "outings" to the grocery store.

And thank the good Lord for September!