Every year in New England, on September 1st, we all prepare for fall. It’s September. It’s Fall. It’s time to get out our cardigans and boots, sleep with the windows open and four blankets, pick apples, drink lattes, and throw around as many decorative gourds as we can.

And every year, on September 1st, we remember that it’s actually still summer.

But our surprise is a gift – doing fun summer stuff in September feels like cheating. I’m swimming in the ocean in September! (And don’t tell anyone the ocean is actually crazy warm in September, or we’ll have to share the beach with too many people.) I’m wearing sundresses in September! We’re having ice cream for dinner in September! Let’s jump in the car after school and do ALL of that on a Thursday!

All the things I was tired of – sand in my car, washing a million towels, late bedtimes, no plans for dinner, car naps – are once again charming and fun. I can sit on a towel by the ocean wondering why we don’t go to the beach EVERY day with absolutely no irony. It’s like my brain was wiped clean on the first day of the month and I’m ready for summer all over again.

The most pleasant part of the whole thing is in a few days (a week, maybe three if we’re lucky) it actually WILL be fall. I’ll vacuum all the sand out of my car and deflate all the floaties until next year. We will all start wearing pants and I’ll buy 3 new striped shirts. We’ll eat apples and chowder and cider donuts and the bakery in Mystic will smell like pumpkin and cinnamon instead of lavender and vanilla. We get our bonus, stolen summer right before the very best part of New England.

This is why we’re still here.

Our house has been invaded by those horrible anthropomorphic snot creatures from the cold medicine commercial. Daddy, Mommy and Baby Snot Creature have all taken up residence in Daddy, Mommy and Baby Evan and are settling in for an extended stay. If only I could remember what the commercial was actually FOR I could go buy some of it and maybe we would feel better.

So far the cough is my only symptom but E claims he also has an overwhelming sense of ickiness and the baby is a little bit grumpy (although he’d feel a lot better if he would just let me WIPE HIS NOSE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD). Otherwise, no fevers, no pains, no need to see a pediatrician, no idea when it will go away. We’re trapped in a miserable purgatory of being too sick to go to group activities  where we could possible contaminate people but nowhere near sick enough to lie around sleeping all day. I’m making an effort to still make it to Stroller Strides as much as possible, just because it breaks up the monotony of 14 straight hours of snotty baby care, but today we were supposed to RUN and running is just not possible when you have to stop and cough up a lung every few feet.

I’m going to feel like an idiot when I realize in a month we aren’t sick, we just have allergies and this self imposed quarantine was pointless. But I would feel even worse if one of the littler babies ended up with RSV because I couldn’t handle playing with my kid at home for a few days. Which I will definitely do as soon as I can find him under all that snot.