Farewell to Summer

Ah, fall.

We have beautiful, cool, sunny fall weather here, to go along with the official first day of the season yesterday.

I have mixed feelings about this change of season.

I absolutely love when the weather gets crisp, the air feels fresh, the leaves start to change. Fall. is. my. favorite.

But, I’m sad to see summer go. For one thing, the start of fall means winter is one step nearer and will almost certainly arrive before December 21st when it officially begins (which here means many loooong months of freezing temps, snow, and ice = blah).

But I’m also a bit sad to see summer end because we had an amazing summer.

We did almost everything on our Summer Fun List.

There were only two things we didn’t quite do.

We didn’t get ice cream from an ice cream truck. I didn’t see one all summer. I even tried to find a local ice cream truck company online to see if I could call and get their routes. Not one. So, I improvised and just bought a few different ice-cream-truck-ish ice creams for my girls to eat at home. One was chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream on a stick. The other was a classic orange push-pop. I’m saying “close enough.”

 

The other thing we didn’t totally mange to complete was to catch fireflies. We tried. Three times. The first time was on the 4th of July. It was too windy. The second time was when our friends came over for a cookout and movie night. It was too cold. The third time was when we were at the Farm in early August. Apparently all the fireflies were dead by then. Who knew they didn’t last all summer? I didn’t. Anyway, we got out there with our nets (the first time). We saw some fireflies (the first time). We just didn’t actually catch any. Next year I’ll know better to make sure we get that one done earlier in the summer.

This past month has been really full of fun end-of-summer activities. I had a lot of stuff to cross off the list by Saturday.

When my parents were here we did a lot. You may remember our camping adventure, which was one thing we checked off.

Since the butterfly garden wasn’t at the Iowa State Fair this year, we took the girls to an amazing children’s garden that has lots of different areas based on picture books.

They even had all the books laminated and available for reading! Heaven.

They hardly had any butterflies in their actual butterfly garden area, but on our way back to the car, we saw this one:

He kindly stayed still long enough for both of the girls to touch him.

We joined forces with Super Friend and her three girls for a trip to a local farm.

The very last thing we completed, just under the wire on Friday morning, was bubble painting.

 

 

Naturally, the bubbles were the actual attraction of this activity. But we did make a few “paintings” too.

“Cheese!” I just love how Lass says it.

 

We are in the progress of developing a “Fall/Winter Fun List.”

After this summer, I am a total believer in having one of these lists with my kids from now on. We did so much stuff this summer that I might not have done without it. The girls really loved checking everything off, and got extra excited about our activities when I told them something was on our list.

I don’t know what it says about me that I need a list to prompt and remind me to do new and exciting stuff with my kids. I guess I don’t really care. The list was awesome.

And now that we’ve done it once, the girls are really into helping me think of fall and winter ideas. I love their fun suggestions.

A sneak preview with some of the things they have come up with so far:

Miss – “Drawing faces on leaves” and “Jumping in a pile of leaves.”

Lass – “Catching snowflakes” and “Making snowballs.”

Stay tuned for the rest of the list soon.