One month left

The twins start kindergarten in ONE MONTH (but who's counting? as Rocket Boy's former coworker used to say, when mentioning his upcoming retirement). Not sure of the exact day, but I believe it'll be either August 26th or August 27th. Four weeks from tomorrow (or the next day). Who's counting? WE ARE.

It has been a pleasant summer, in many ways, but Rocket Boy and I are wearing out. It is hard to take care of very active, constantly battling, five-year-old twin boys (who no longer take naps) all day every day, especially when you're old, like we are. For us this year, summer really began in May, when we arrived. Then there was all of June. Now almost all of July. And we still have August.

I'm running out of ideas for new and exciting things to do. We've nearly made it through the alphabet, so that's an achievement. This past week was X week -- X is for XXX -- I couldn't even come up with a word. Xylophone Week didn't seem to offer a lot of possibilities.

The X week poster is the pink one at top right. For pictures I just put up a bunch of random stickers and put X's on top of them -- like a gun with an X indicating "no guns" and a cat with an X indicating "no cats" and Elmo with an X indicating "no Elmo."

Finding X books at the library was challenging, but I did discover a few.

Not too bad, if I do say so myself. And yes, we really did read the book about Malcolm X. Twice (at Baby A's request).

But I couldn't come up with any good X activities. We didn't even make an X food, and I really could have done that if I'd felt creative (an X-shaped pizza, or some such). But I didn't. Instead we went to parks and pools. (I never manage to take any photos of us swimming, but here are our towels, drying on the line.)

And you can't knock parks and pools. I keep reminding myself: in Ridgecrest it would have been too hot to go to the park, and there was hardly any place to go swimming. Here we have endless choices. In addition to swim lessons at the East Boulder Rec Center, this week we enjoyed the pool at the Lafayette Rec Center, which is excellent for kids -- a nice shallow "Splash Pool," with a small slide and a giant mushroom with water streaming down from it (alternating with a rock waterfall), and a separate pool for slightly older kids with a "river" and a huge slide. Today we thought we'd try the Louisville Rec Center, but we weren't impressed by the kids' pool, so we went back to Lafayette instead. I've also heard good things about the pools in Erie, Broomfield, and Golden, so maybe we'll venture further afield. All these riches.

In Ridgecrest, as the end of July arrived, we would always be desperately sick of the heat, but we'd have our August trips to look forward to. The last three years we had two nice family trips each August, one with my cousins (to June Lake or elsewhere) and one with my sister (to Mammoth). Then we'd come home and a week or two later it'd be September, and it would STILL be hot. Often over 100 every day until October.

We don't have any trips like that planned this year. No one to visit nearby, no money for a big trip, and especially now that we have a diabetic cat, I think we'd better not plan anything major. Maybe another camping trip, or just an overnight at the cabin, we haven't done that yet (and maybe we could even bring Pie Bear, with his insulin in a cooler). Whatever we do, we'll survive, because at the end of the month, SCHOOL WILL START, and then Rocket Boy and I will have a little bit of time to ourselves during the day. I just long for that little bit of time to myself.

Of course, if I start doing temp work then, I won't have any time to myself. But office work is so relaxing compared to taking care of five-year-olds. And then we'll have some more money, and that would be good too.

And it'll get cooler. September in Boulder is a much cooler month than September in Ridgecrest. We'll have to start thinking about warmer clothes, like snow boots and heavy jackets. This winter is going to be interesting, that's for sure.

We'll get through the next month. I just don't want it to be nothing but this:

so I'm sure we'll be going to lots more parks and lots more pools. It's all good. And we will survive.