It’s been a cool, rainy, overcast, muggy, hot, brisk, temperamental June so far. Basically, the weather has been acting like a three year old lately. In other news, the sky is blue and the grass is green.

We are counting down the days until the end of another school year. Including today, MM has four day left as a first grader. It is hard to believe that this fall I will have a second grader and a girl starting 4k!

What I’m reading:

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, which my book club will be discussing at the end of the month. I can already tell this is going to be a book that sticks with me because just putting it down every night I find myself mentally cutting the strings between the book and reality so that I can fall asleep, reminding myself that the world in the book is not, in fact, the world we are living in even when some of the similarities are compelling. I love a good dystopian novel and this one certainly fits the bill of so bizarre and yet so plausible it’s eerie.

“On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, 11-year-old Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life–the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.”

What I’m watching:

With all of the fall shows over, I find myself digging for shows to watch this summer while the kids are napping. Dan and I will be catching up on our DVR in the evenings and then likely getting into a series on Netflix Instant – perhaps Torchwood? We’ve even tossed around the idea of watching old Star Trek episodes so that our Geek Cards won’t be invalidated. Naptime has been seeing a lot of silly tween shows like Good Luck Charlie, Sam & Cat, and ANTfarm (don’t judge) that require very little thinking and cooking shows like Food Network Star, Cupcake Wars & The Pioneer Woman.

Items of Note:

We moved BB over to booster seats this weekend. It’s been a plan of ours for awhile but we saw a good deal on a seat at Costco and decided to go for it. She is loving the new Big Girl Status and we are loving that getting her in and out of the car just got so much easier.

We have also been thinking about removing some of the old, ugly bushes in front of our house and planting something new in their place. Dan got the world’s biggest crow bar and tried it out on a tiny tree in the backyard that didn’t survive the past few winters. He’s pretty confident it will help get the job done with the other trees, but we’ll see.

Stories I’ve told:

A few weeks ago the kids were picking up this maple seeds and I randomly started making up a story about how the fairies used them as training wings until their real ones grew in and how we needed to make sure to not pick up too many of them to keep so that the training fairies could get around. This led to lots of long discussions about all things fairy – do fairies sleep during the day or are they just invisible? About how tall grass gone to seed is really fairy trees and how the fairies have guard dogs (ticks) hiding in their trees to protect them and they may bite you if you walk in tall grass like that so never, ever walk in fairy trees! And so on. And so forth.

The other day I was feeling guilty about telling them stories like this, especially with my son who likely tells all these stories at school and someday he’s going to question the authenticity of my tales so I had a talk with him about beliefs versus known facts and how my fairy stories were really just “beliefs” I had that may be true but also may not. I threw in other examples of things people believe and like to tell stories about but that may or may not be true. Like Santa. And the Easter Bunny. ETC.

“But mommy, the Easter Bunny is REAL!” MM argued. I asked him how he knew for sure and he said, “He leaves us Easter baskets!”

“But how do you know a bunny did that? What if it’s an Easter Kangaroo and he’s just tricking you into thinking he’s a rabbit?”

It was one of our first Lofty Conversations and I think I did a good job of getting across my message without ruining his childhood. ::pats self on back::

What I’m Looking Forward to:

Camping, long summer days, Fireworks, visiting my new nephew this summer!!!!, berry picking, going to the beach, you know: SUMMER.

what are you into these days? Let me know in the comments below!