4 hours ago
I don't know who needs to hear this, but August is still summer.
Bunches of people online and in my real life have already started the school year, and I'm over here drinking my lemonade in the sunshine and trying not to think about school at all yet. June, July, and August are the months with the warmest weather around here, and it occurred to me the other day that it would be perfectly fine to delay the start of the school year and just finish a little later next May - since May often still brings snowstorms to the mountains anyway. So I'm in no rush to call the summer done yet. I'm not so sure about the kids - if anything is going to push me to bump up our homeschool start date, it's the kids getting bored.
July was actually quite rainy, but as I write this, the plan for this weekend is to attempt porch camping with the kids, a yearly tradition for us. However, when I checked the weather, Sunday night it is supposed to get down to 33 degrees Fahrenheit, which is almost freezing! Not acceptable. We may have to delay the camping plan - another reason I am not anxious to end the summer. We haven't been able to do everything yet! (Update: Since I first typed this up, we did actually porch-camp, and it was actually the hottest week of the summer, definitely not near freezing! Weather forecast reliability never changes.)
We have done alot of the typical summer things over the past month - swimming, park days, the zoo, hiking. Lots of time with friends, including a lovely week with our Kentucky friends when they were in town. My parents celebrated their 40th anniversary, and took us all to Great Wolf Lodge. We may never have ended up going there on our own (it's not cheap, and cheap is the name of the game right now), but it was such a special treat, and I'm glad we could have memories there with extended family!
We also had a lovely 4th of July, and you have to permit me to share a few photos. We spent the day hanging around the house, making the stereotypical flag cake and watching the Sandlot, and then having dinner at my parents' and watching fireworks.
Aside from that, our big outing for July was a trip to a little mountain town that is particularly known for its wildflowers - and it did not disappoint. We had no real plan except for one hiking trail that we wanted to check out. After wandering around the town a little bit and eating our packed lunch, we took to the trail, and I have never seen so many wildflowers in one place in my life. The reputation is well earned! I couldn't stop taking pictures and exclaiming about how beautiful everything was. We counted 21 different varieties of wildflowers! I wish I could show you every picture of my cute kids, and every view, but here are just a few.
I had intended to spend this summer trying out new pie recipes, but instead my domestic pursuits were diverted a bit when a friend from church offered to teach me how to can preserves. So for the last couple weeks I have been researching recipes and food safety rules, obtaining cans and produce, and trying my hand at it. I've made blueberry lime jam, and apple-pie-in-a-jar jam, and mango raspberry jam. It appears that all my cans have sealed just fine, so I guess I did it right! Am I still going to test out the jam before my family and wait 12-36 hours to see if I develop botulism symptoms before they eat it? Probably, but that's just because I have major germaphobe tendencies. I followed all the rules, fruit jam is acidic and botulism doesn't grow in acidic foods, so I actually feel very confident in my jam and accomplished. But you know, just in case.
It doesn't help much that I have been binge-reading Richard Preston's books about the history of the ebola virus. Remember about ten years back when we had a few cases in the United States? I remember being slightly anxious about it since I was still working as a dental hygienist (ie. dealing with alot of bloody gums), and I was pregnant at the time too. Well, let me just say, if I had known more details about the ebola virus, I would have been even more freaked out. I really don't know if there is another virus that is so brutal and gory. My goodness. I'm never visiting the rainforest, and keep monkeys or bats or any tropical creatures far away from me, that's all I'm saying.
My big kids participated in 4H this year, and did woodworking, sewing, and leather working projects. A few of their projects got accepted to be displayed at our state fair, so now we are trying to figure out if we can make the trip in the fall to check it out. I am so proud of them for all their hard work, and thankful for an even more hardworking husband, the unsung hero of our 4H experiences.
Even though I am determined not to cut the summer short, I do also have to start planning the school year soon, so in the next week or two I'm going to sit down and get the year mapped out. Everyone has a different school planning system, but over the last couple years I've developed a bit of a system. It gives me enough structure to keep us on track, but enough flexibility that I don't feel too much pressure. I may work on a post about it soon.
The other big project on which I'd love to make some progress is sorting through pictures and getting them printed and into some albums. This is a never-ending project for me, to be honest. I've printed off little bunches of photos here and there, but I want to do the complete family photo albums from each year, and it's expensive and time-consuming. I'm printing out photos as my budget permits, and 2014 photos just arrived in the mail last week. In the meantime, I am just about to get started on organizing and choosing favorites from the year 2016.
In some ways it is really fun to look through pictures of my kids from all those years ago - my goodness, they were cute. They still are! But seeing their little faces every day is also hard on my heart. Time has gone so fast. It kills me whenever I stop for a moment and reflect that I'll be the parent of a legal adult in less than five years (let that soak in).
I look at the pictures and even though I remember the hard parts of those little years, I also realize that I did soak them up and treasure those times. Sometimes I beat myself up for not treasuring them enough, but I did actually. The way I took so much care to capture all their little features and quirks proves it to me. Still, when it's gone you always wish you held on to the moments just a little bit more. It's never enough - never enough time, never enough time with my precious babies who aren't babies anymore.
I may have had a higher than average number of crying sessions since starting this project. But it's reminding me to soak up this moment we're in right now too. In ten years I'll look back at pictures again, and I'll see how little they were, and I'll remember. Remember how much I loved it all. I can be filled up to the brim with the joy of right now with them. That's all we can ever do, and it doesn't seem like enough, but it also is.
Motherhood is beauty and sadness, joy and pain, love and frustrations and laughing and happiness mixed up with tears. The best thing I'll ever do. And you can't go back, but through every stage until the Lord takes me home I'll have this joy of being their mom, and that will never cease to be a gift.
Okay, now that I've got that sentimentality out of my system, I'll wish you all a happy Monday, and promise to try to be a better blogger now that summer busyness is settling down. But just know that if I'm not here, if I go a couple weeks between blog posts, or if my social media gets stale, I'm not quitting the blog or anything - I'm just not letting them grow up without paying attention.
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