Welcome to August in New England, where the weather cools down juuuuust enough to make life bearable, the days are still super long, and the kids can SENSE that I’m shipping them off to school soon so they start demanding the playground every day.

Sunday:

When you take gymnastics, every wall is a balance beam

The King of All Wild Things demands a rumpus.

Admiring herself in the table reflection. Vanity, thy name is Caroline.

Monday:

HI PIRANHAS! I LOVE YOU! YOU SO SPARKLY!

Want to see him wait patiently? Promise him grilled cheese.

Swinger

Tuesday:

I walked to the grocery store. The halfway point is the hospital where both kids were born.

MORE SWINGING!

Photographer (and model) in training

Wednesday:

Evan decorated her hair during a cat nap

Appropriate scooter attire

Creepy ass princess takes a bath

Thursday:

When you don’t have a photography studio, you improvise. Thank God for sliding glass doors.

Scooter pro already

Photography assistant for my evening maternity shoot

Friday:

She found the shirt she liked and wouldn’t even LOOK at anything else.

I got beat at Princess Chutes and Ladders by a 2 year old. It hurts.

Uh oh, I hear sirens…

Saturday:

TINY PRE-K SCHOOL UNIFORMS I CAN’T EVEN.

Photo editing while the kids watch a surprisingly not terrible fake Pixar movie about sea turtles.

Terribly grainy drive thru photo of the kids attempting the clapping part of the Cups song.

E’s hours are still killing him, but we managed to fit in some family time today, which was super fun. He even put up a curtain rod we’ve been meaning to put up for seven years. Maybe in another seven years we’ll fix the shower door that’s been broken since we moved in!  No, probably not. That clothes pin keeps it closed pretty well.

Every once in a while we get a day together as a family where we DON’T have anything planned but still manage to get ourselves out of the house and into the real world. It’s incredibly rare and easy to scare away if I start saying things like “Have you heard about this place in Maine?” or “I found out about this beach down I-95…” or “SHOPPING”. If I can balance my desire to do ALL THE THINGS with my hard-working husband’s desire to do NONE OF THE THINGS we get a unicorn day.  The trick is…this was all in town. We never went more than 3 miles from our house.

It’s amazing we’ve managed to find enough balance in the past 9 years to stay married. Nine years (and one day) and two gingers and more perfect days to come.

Warning: One bazillion photos to follow.

I love this life <3

DO ALL THE SUMMER BEFORE IT’S GONE.

Sunday:

I put away the changing pad (that I’ve used maybe twice ever) since I don’t have any babies anymore.

Fresh neighborhood eggs are a game of IS THERE A CHICKEN FETUS IN THIS OR NO?

Best spot ever for senior pictures? Probably.

Monday:

Tired.

Mess.

Tired.

Tuesday:

I WILL MISS YOU WHILE I AM AT SCHOOL BABY SISTER EVEN THOUGH WE ARE GOING TO SAME SCHOOL.

Mommy the donkey is my best friend!

Cloud or portal opened to another dimension by a tesseract?

Wednesday:

Our last gymnastics class. She’ll have to use her super strength somewhere else.

Our duck pond has an endless supply of adorable baby ducks and I cannot stop taking pictures of them.

Waiting patiently for her grilled cheese.

Thursday:

NO PICTURES PLEASE.

Tinker Bell rests in the tasting room of the winery. Being a fairy is hard work.

My sister and her boyfriend are EXCELLENT child watchers. I like them.

Friday:

The princess generously bestows bacon upon her people.

Beach baby

THREE GINGERS.

Saturday:

Yard sale. Most of it’s on the curb now, it was not a smashing success. But at least it’s all out of my house.

Second day of the princess dress. I peeled it off her to wash it because 2 year olds are gross.

Watching more Watch Us Edit videos from Clickin Moms and it’s still blowing my mind.

It was a surprisingly good week, even if I continue to make poor choices in regards to my own bedtime. 11 pm has become midnight has become 1 am, which means I’m getting like 5 hours of sleep which means I am chronically tired which is my OWN FAULT and yet I keep doing it. I am not very good at learning my lesson. I’m also so, so excited about Ginger Snaps Pictures (website! facebook! in progress, so don’t judge too harshly) and the photography classes/workshops/critiques I’ve signed up for I CAN’T go to bed any earlier. I need those post-kid hours. Although I have managed to thoroughly wear them out several days this week so they took naps – NAPS! – and slept a full 12 hours at night.

This week will be almost as full as last week, which is my favorite kind of week. Even if I am tired.

One of the best parts of summer is the constant parade of farmer’s markets in our area. If I put a little effort into it, I bet I could go to at least one a day (and two on most days). Unfortunately, just because food is fresh and local and organic and free-range doesn’t make it calorie-free. Which is totally, totally unfair. If I’m going to make an effort to eat natural, real food the payoff should be automatically fitting into my jeans. Why doesn’t science work like that?

The kids love the farmer’s market(s), although I’m sure that has more to do with the fact that the majority of the vendors we visit sell things like kettle corn and maple cotton candy. (Getting any ideas why my jeans don’t fit?) Plus our favorite – the Bozrah one on Friday nights – is like an automatic playdate. We always run into people we know, the vendors are all super nice, and there are tons of free samples. There’s a whole corner of cheese merchants, which might be Caroline’s idea of heaven. Who knew my 2 year old would go nuts for a fresh chevre with herbs de provence?  Last week there was a barrel train pulled by ponies. PONY. TRAIN. It was almost too much, and I don’t mean for the kids. I might have actually squeed over the ponies.

There are a lot of disadvantages to living in a state we don’t technically have any connection to. We are not from here. We don’t have any family here. We’re transplants and no matter how many of my children are born here or how long I live here I will never actually think of myself as being “from Connecticut”. I don’t feel the same deep obsession and connection to this place that I did when I first set foot in Charleston during a college visit. But after 8 years in New England and 7 in this town, I do love it.

We live in Connecticut. It’s the only home my children know. It’s become a huge part of our daily family affirmations: “I’m Evan and you’re Mommy and sister is Caroline and we live in Norwich!” They can both tell me exactly how far down the road to school the town ends and are always asking if we’re back in Norwich yet any time we drive more than a few blocks.

I think home is a confusing thing when you’re little – you know your house is home, but what’s outside that? Your yard? Your street? Your town? Your county? I tried to explain America to Evan yesterday because he wanted to know why there were so many Captain America flags. (He called the American flag the “Captain America flag”, because obviously identifying superheros correctly is a more important skill to teach your children than real facts). I told him we lived in a town, in a state, in a country called America and sometimes people live in other towns in other states in other countries. He was fine with states, but didn’t like the idea of something bigger. I told him his Aunt Carolyn used to live in France, which is a country across the ocean. He said “I would be sad if I live in France.” I told him he didn’t have to move to France and could stay with me forever and I really truly meant it.

Although I’m sure if he knew he could have baguettes for dinner every day in France he’d get over it.

This was his dinner request. A whole loaf of bread. He ate more than half.

We got Mango Tango

Buying it his own self.

Not our pizza, although my kids ate half of it.

When I went to Boston a couple weeks ago for the Red Sox family focus group thing, one of the ideas we bloggers had was an earlier, kid-friendly game. Activities for the kids, cheap food, and maybe a big sign that says “WARNING: CHILDREN’S SECTION” so no one gave us dirty looks when our kid talked through the whole thing. It turns out that’s already an event, called Futures at Fenway, and the team generously offered us tickets so we could attend. I wasn’t sure we’d last the whole 9 innings and I was pretty sure I’d spend most of my time walking around with a very bored 2-year-old and I wouldn’t see much of the game, but I love love love Fenway so we made plans to go anyway.

It turns out my children LIKE baseball. OK, maybe they mostly like popcorn and peanuts and giant sodas ($7.50 plus free refills! Best deal ever!) and getting to sit in my lap. But that translated into watching the whole 8 1/2 innings (We won!) from our seats. I didn’t even have to resort to letting them watch Disney Jr on my phone. It was a good game too – it wasn’t the Red Sox, but the Sea Dogs, their affiliate team. That means these guys are still hoping to get noticed by the major leagues and so they try really, really hard. They run even if it looks like an easy out at first, they FLING themselves across the field for diving catches, they strike out instead of always taking the walk. It was exciting! It was tons of fun! It was a long day for a 2.5 year old and there might have been a tiiiiiiny bit of whining and crying but it was one of the best family days we’ve ever had. I felt relaxed almost the whole time – and when was the last time I said that about a summer afternoon at a crowded public event with two small children?

I was going to write a whole paragraph about how sports – even just a vague awareness that your grandfather really loved golf, explained you ball data and made you watch it on TV in the summers when you were visiting – can mean a lot to a kid. But there seems to be a lot of dust in here and my eyes are, uh, watering quite a bit, so I’ll just say I hope Evan and Caroline have great memories of our visits to Fenway and that we can make it a summer tradition.

p.s. The event had a TON of stuff that was kid friendly – the zoo and the aquarium had animals there, Kidz Bop did a concert after the game and a meet-and-greet, the players signed autographs, a bounce house – plus the concessions were half priced. We enjoyed the eating and the bounce house, but the kids did so great in our seats we didn’t really NEED all the distractions. I would highly recommend it for families.

Disclaimer: The PR team for the Red Sox left us tickets at will-call so we could attend. No other compensation was provided. Tickets for the event started at just $5, so trust me when I say they didn’t pay for me to talk about the event.