Sort-of end of summer

A couple of weeks ago I started worrying because summer was ending and I was going back to work soon and the boys were going back to daycare (preschool for Will) and it felt like summer just began and my summer to-do list still had an awful lot of unchecked boxes on it. So I decided instead of worrying I would focus on what we did get done this summer, and I ended up feeling actually pretty excited. I'll cheat a bit and start back in March, but this summer we demolded, scraped, and repainted the upstairs bathroom ceiling, had a storm door installed in the dining room, built from scratch and planted a square-foot garden (see pictures above), thoroughly weeded and laid down landscaping fabric and mulch all along the side of the house and along the fence in the backyard, painted the downstairs bathroom, and had our front walk redone. Also, I joined the Y and established a regular and enjoyable workout routine. Really, that's not so bad! What we didn't do was clean and treat the back deck and finish the landscaping work on the front of the house. But I expect to have at least another couple of months of reasonably nice weather before the ground freezes, so I think we could manage to get at least the landscaping done still this year. The deck might wait until next summer.




Here are Will and Ryan on their first day back at daycare. School officially starts for Will next week, but they put him in the preschool room already so nothing will really change for him once school starts except that there will be more kids for the morning. The first day went really well. The drop off wasn't too bad and the boys were excited to see us when we picked them up. Every morning since then has been harder and harder, though. I guess the novelty of being back wore off, so the separation has gotten more difficult. But the teachers assure us that they're doing just fine during the day and they're both very happy when we pick them up. Plus one of the teachers wrote on Will's daily report that he's a "swell kid." I thought that was really cute.



We picked the boys up early on their first day, and when we got home Ryan helped me harvest some ripe tomatoes from our garden (see picture above). Now, let me talk about my garden for a while. I'm enormously proud of it. I think it is beautiful. Now, it does happen that it didn't produce a whole lot this year, so I am thrilled with each and every tomato that we get to eat. It produced zero edible strawberries, zero cucumbers, zero eggplants, and zero peppers. And zero of lots of other vegetables, but I chose to list by name only those that we actually planted. So the tomatoes are about it. Next year I'll get the plants started earlier and maybe we'll have some better luck, but I'm honestly pretty happy with how it came out this year.