August...

Oh my. It is flying by.

I have been taking it all in, trying to keep all my plates spinning in the air. I've dropped a few, and blogging is one of them. My bad. I'm going to try and pick up the pieces.

Here is a mishmash of my last month, mostly in pictures.

Sand. Still washing and sweeping sand out of every nook and cranny of our lives. I don't think I'll ever get it all out of my car. Not complaining, just commenting.

But look - there are so many kinds:

I love this sand collection my daughter and I put together. It is one of several, including a smaller tin of smaller metal containers and a set of  tiny, tiny bottles. She gave her partner a little bottle layered with all the sands they played on this year.

I can almost identify all of them now without looking, and they make my inner geology nerd extremely happy. The one in the upper right full of shells was literally what yards and yards of Tybee Island GA was covered with. Every step was crunchy as those fragile tiny shells broke underfoot. I couldn't bear to walk on them.

Well, we are done with all this for a little while. I thought we would keep playing in the sand until the weather turned, but the pull of high school volleyball was too strong and she has laced up her shoes and put on the knee pads for one more go around in the gym. We are thrilled to get to cheer her on one more season. It will be crazy hectic with her new job, but she won't regret it, I'm sure of that. Somehow I ended up the team mom, and I'm equally dreading the extra work and thrilled to get to hang out with the girls, they are a wonderful bunch, and I won't be doing this kind of thing again, ever. Senior year, endings and beginnings.

This is a picture of our last day at the beach in Chicago. We all had a great day.



On the home front, the yard and garden have gone into late summer lush. Everything is so green and busy, with the last push of the season.

I'm hopeful about the melons and inundated with cucumbers. I've already made three batches of refrigerator pickles.  I'm trying to keep up with the watering, but some of my full sun containers are a lost cause. Luckily, the garden is doing its thing, and I am letting it. The chaos bothers my orderly husband, but I just tell him not to look. I never was good at thinning or pulling volunteers. And there are lots of volunteers this year, especially tomatoes. 

There's one huge beautiful plant in there that I have no idea what it is or where it came from, it looks like celery or parsley family, very decorative, and a swallowtail caterpillar ate it for days until it disappeared. I regret not bringing it inside to keep it safe.

Even a few fall colors are creeping in already, in this oddly cool August, likely because it's been so dry lately.

Tucker has enjoyed both kids home for the summer. He's kept the yard free of squirrels, chipmunks and baby bunnies, and has let no neighbor walk or jog past without barking insanely at them until they are out of sight. Some dogs just have to do that I guess, there's no stopping him.

  

He's keeping me busy with the let me in/let me out game.

This is right before his paw got stung by a bee. It was a pitiful display of trembling and limping for about an hour, but he rebounded quickly. The mornings have been cool and damp and the bumbles have been slow to get moving. He must have gotten too close while he was eating grass, one of his favorite things to do.

Other significant happenings this month included my first baby turning 20, and we watched the old VHS home movies of him as a happy baby, a curious toddler, a funny young boy and they made me cry. Not because it was sad, but because it was so sweet and I wanted to be back in those happy moments again.
I could never have foreseen the young man he would become, and as much as I miss that baby and that boy, I'm so glad to know the man he's becoming.

(I was also happy to find Friendly's Ice Cream. Its an east coast thing, I think.)

He celebrated his birthday and then his second anniversary with his girlfriend. He helped get her moved back into school in Missouri and heads back to his school in Illinois next week.  It's going to be pretty quiet around her with him gone.

My first fairy garden has been an endless source of amusement to me this summer.

It went from this....

to this....... overrun, but in a good way.

I'm not sure how I'll keep it alive this winter, but I'm going to try.

Hope your summer has been full and lush and magical with a touch of nostalgia thrown in for good measure.

I'll try to check in again before the fall.......

xo