Fall-ish

Friday morning came with overcast sky’s and a rainy forecast.  Glory hallelujah.  Please let there be rain and wind and a nip in the air.  Please let even the slightest bit of Fall-ness enter my sticky, Texan existence.   So when our storytime lady practically shrieked in the middle of her book, look children!  It’s raining!  I was genuinely excited.  As we made our way out the door the rain had subsided, but it was wet and grey.  And still warm and sticky.  Oh well.  I’ll take what I can get.

We’re in the home stretch of the husbands big exam.  When he’s not at work, he’s studying–every weekend, every evening.  We’re all ready for it to be over.  But he’s starting to get to the I-don’t-care phase.  The phase where you’ve studied and studied so much that you’re not sure if you’re learning more or just confusing yourself.  So even though he was still mostly MIA this weekend, it seemed like we were able to pull him away from the books a little more.  I didn’t realize how much his absence had been affecting the girls until I saw how his slight reappearance in our lives threw Lamp into all-dad-all-the-time-mode.  It was like she knew she better take as much of him as she could get, while she could get it.  Dad I want you, she said over and over.  Music to his ears.

*****

While it’s not exactly Fall, it’s definitely cooled down considerably.  As per my post a couple weeks ago I knew I needed a project–especially with the husband gone so much.  Something to beautify, as well as something to keep us girls busy while dad’s away.  Doing a small, backyard yard make over in the fall messes with my already messed up internal seasonal clock.  But seriously, you just can’t do yard work in the summer.  That’s crazy yo.  And since we’ve still got months of pleasant weather ahead we’re doing it now.  Which means we did some of this:

I love doing yard work with my kiddos.  There is something about working in dirt and plants and rocks that brings a different type of satisfaction than any other form of work.  It also brings a much needed break from our digital world and suddenly my girls are noticing beauty in the real world and small details they may have overlooked if they weren’t sitting on the ground running dirt through their hands and feet.  Small details like the spotless ladybug PSP found.  Amazing right?

And I finally saw this:

Turn into this:

I don’t want to give the backyard make-over away…but I love how these chairs turned out.  Hopefully I can wrap up the backyard soon.  A back yard dinner party might be in order.

*****

Sunday morning came with the realization that maybe I couldn’t produce a chill in the air, or a backdrop of red, orange and yellow leaves, but I could make our home smell of pumpkin spice.  So a pumpkin coffee cake and pumpkin pie almonds were the order of the morning.  If the only feeling of fall I’m going to get is within the walls of our home, that’s good enough for me.

So that was our weekend…how was yours?