Bookworm

It was so good to be back with my little ones today. We hung out at the house for a while this morning (and they tried on the new 80's-style clothes I brought back from Chicago for them) and went to the park for a while before lunch, happy to play in the (finally!) non-humid weather. We spent the afternoon at Connie's in-law's lake and the kids tired themselves right out catching minnows, floating on and diving off of rafts, eating ice cream cones, making sand houses, and splashing in the warm water. The girls were exhausted when we came back in the door at 5:30, so we did baths before I fed them dinner and read books on the couch before a very early bedtime. I am so conscious that we have only a few more weeks of these laid-back, sunshiney, spontaneous days; I'm seizing the chance to be out in the water and the warmth every time it's possible.

Because of the very early bedtime, Annie had already been tucked in her room for about half an hour before Jason came home from a post-work meeting. I'd promised her that he'd go in and give her a kiss when he got home, thinking she'd be sleeping anyway and never know the difference. But Jason really did go in to kiss her sleeping forehead and instead he found her propped up on her back in bed, reading Little Bear, eyes half-closed from drowsiness. She reads all the time now: Magic School Bus, Henry and Mudge, Ramona and Her Father, The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, Fancy Nancy Sees Stars. Neither one of us had the heart (or the inclination, actually) to tell her to put the book away and go to sleep. Staying up past your bedtime reading in bed is the kind of familiar vice I'm going to count as a virtue, and cross my fingers that she's still doing it thirty years from now, like her mommy.