First Day of School 2011

Today is the first day of school. No more staying up late and sleeping in the loft watching movies and having sleep overs with friends and playing in the jacuzzi all day and having no schedule. Back to the grind. We prepared last night with haircuts, root beer floats and Father's blessings (which even Nathan wanted to be a part of). Then this morning Caelan and Ben got breakfast in bed. This tradition started a couple years ago when Caelan asked me on Father's Day, "When is kids' day? You know - where we get breakfast in bed?" I told her I would give her breakfast in bed on the first day of school....and it's become a tradition ever since. We got ready and loaded up the crew and drove them to school to find their classrooms and teachers: Caelan (3rd grade) has Ms. Coffee, and Ben (1st grade) has Ms. Fox. They were both excited to be back. Goodbye Summer.

Summer

We actually got a garden planted this year. Our squash plants have taken off, especially the zucchini. Ben likes to come out and help me pick the vegetables when they are ready. We have tomatoes, peppers, beans (although not very many), yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers and some cilantro. It's not a huge garden. We wanted to just do a moderate sized one this year. Lots of people have to take all sorts of precautions with their gardens; chicken wire underneath to prevent ground squirrels, a fence around to keep out rabbits, lots of fertilizer because of hard earth, some even had to put a plastic covering over because of birds. I wasn't sure what to expect so we did nothing just to see what would happen. Our dog keeps out the rabbits, we haven't seen any ground squirrels, the birds aren't a problem and our ground in actually pretty good. Next year we'll have to do something a little bigger. We have also gotten a lot of good use out of our jacuzzi this summer. We just turned the heat off and run the filter. The kids go out and swim almost every day. It's great: shallow enough to not worry when the bigger kids are out there (I still watch carefully when Nathan is there), but big and deep enough to cool off and have fun. They had their friends over the other day. I think a total of 7 kids were playing in that little jacuzzi. Good times.