Life in Scribbletown Love Among the Sticky.

Well, we have arrived at the final weeks of summer. For us, that means four more weeks. School begins the Tuesday after Labor Day. Since my husband begins teaching on Aug 20, and has scattered meetings between now and then, the kids are going to daycare/camp full time. This means much more money going out the window but for them it means a few more field trips. Dusty is off to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum today. She is looking forward to it, but not the bus ride down. The bus is loud, the back seats are hot and the a/c unit drips water into the bus on sharp turns. Red was to go to a park nearby yesterday but we are in a heat advisory this week (first really, really hot weather all summer) so it was cancelled. There was still swimming, though.

The garden is a disaster. I’ve given up on the squash plants – the bugs, despite my efforts – destroyed them. The eggplants were eventually eaten as well. Tomatoes still ripen and beans still grow but the corn didn’t do so well. The bed is too shallow and we waited too long to pick the tiny ears. While we were gone, the birds had their way with them so at least someone got to eat it. Sigh. I’m planning for next year and there will a number of things eliminated from the roster. The weeds are……well, out of control. And it’s too hot to do anything about it right now so its all junglized until I can wrest some control.

But, there are still things on our summer agenda yet to do. We will see the Harry Potter movie on Saturday. We finished the book at the beach so now we are free to see the movie. We need to make one more trip to the lake, esp as we have coupons for $1 each admission. I’d hate to see those go to waste. I’d hoped to do some letterboxing with Dusty but we’ve either not found the time or its been too hot to trudge through tick- and mosquito-infested woods looking for water-logged stamps. Perhaps we’ll do that in the fall.

The children, though, have been making their own fun. They watched this PowerPuffGirls episode the other night and walked around saying, “Git off my PROPITY!” to each other, to Pokey (who is always messing with somebody’s property), to Barbies. In fact, when Red was taking a bath last night, her plastic fairies were yelling at each other about property issues and being quite unfairy-like in the process. You can lead a kid to gender-specific toys but you can’t make them act in gender-specific ways. These were two mean fairies. I believe they might have been robber pirate fairies.

During the past two nights, they’ve been playing a game on my bed where they sing:

We Are The Mummies!
We Are The Mummies!
We Are The Mummies!
And Here We Go!

while standing on the edge of my mattress. At “go” they fall face-forward onto it. It’s one of the few things they can do together without fighting. It looks like fun. I can remember doing something similar (without the song) on my mom’s couch when I was young (obviously). I’d stand on the arm and just fall forward. I had a zillion ways to amuse myself back then. I still do but they usually involve something less potentially dangerous.

Red has been keeping us informed about her imaginary grandparents. She told us yesterday, on the way home, that they live in a restaurant house. “They serve all kinds of good food: pizza and noodles and ice cream. And sometimes meat. Hotdogs…..” and then Red couldn’t think of anymore meat-related items. Hot dogs show up frequently in books and tv. I guess if she’d thought hard enough about it she’d have come up with hamburgers, too.

So, summer may be slowly winding down but Red’s world has not. Which is a good thing. I wonder what her teacher will think of her when she starts kindergarten.

I am also doing my best to enjoy the often-chaotic commutes these last few weeks with both kids in the car. Because this is the end of an era. The era of small children being taken to daycare. Soon, they will both ride a bus to school. They will be picked up from the after-school program by their dad and I will have my car to myself five days a week. I will have much less opportunity for interesting discussions with Dusty, much less opportunity to listen to Red tell me all the things going on in her brain (and, no, it NEVER rests). This makes me sad. But, as Red gets older, there are more opportunities to do other things she’d previously been to young for.

On Columbus Day, I think I may take them both up to the National Zoo for the day. We can hop on the train, take the metro to the zoo, and hop back on at the end of the day. The world widens, life changes. I guess I’m ready for it. Not that I have much choice.