September

School is in full swing, we are cramming in whatever little bits of summer we still can, and it snowed a few days ago.  That about sums up the month. Here are a few items of note:

Football:  We are a football family!  Will is playing flag again.  He's on a team with 7-10 year olds but he's holding his own.  He's a Viking this year and his flag football team officially has a better record than the professionals.  We all went to the Wyoming game a few weekends ago and watched the Broncos on tv last Sunday.  Will watches some of the games on tv with us but Reina is mostly disinterested.  Her current favorite sporting event to watch is America's Ninja Warrior.  She yells "that's not fair!" when anyone of them fails to complete a challenge.  She's cheers loudest for the few girl competitors, naturally. How did she become an ANW fan, you may ask?  I take the credit/blame. I was folding laundry on a slow Saturday afternoon and was watching it mostly because there was nothing else on and also because I've become slightly intrigued with the whole competition even though most of it is just ridiculously bizarre.  So Reina came in, saw one of the female competitors complete the challenge and was hooked. 

Weather:  It snowed Thursday night.  Yep, Sept. 11.  That was our first frost, followed by our second frost the next night but the forecast looks nice for the next week. I still have many vegetable plants in various stages of harvest that I tried to protect from the snow.  We'll see if it worked.  We've had a strange gardening season.  Two hailstorms wiped out a lot of what we planted but lots of rain and sunshine helped give us bumper crops of zucchini and tomatoes (if I can keep the plants alive for a few more weeks). 

School:  Both kids are having an excellent school year.  Reina is brimming with kindergarten knowledge and happily points out all of the ways that Mrs. Teacher does things and all of the ways that I do those things wrongly.   She's building on the learning she started at Montessori and is just so ready to start reading.  As I mentioned before, she fills me in on all of the many details about her day.  At the grocery store the other evening, out of the blue she announces that her gym teacher always has a mad face.  Reina's very sensitive about facial expressions and she frequently asks if I'm mad, when I actually just need more under eye makeup.  So I asked her if Mr. Gym Teacher also sounded mad, or if his face just looked mad.  She thought about it for a minute and decided that he sounded mad too.  Frankly, if I taught kindergarten P.E., I'd probably have a mad face most of the time too!

Will has a great teacher again this year and while he's not enthusiastically recapping each day during the drive home, he's doing well.  He and I are reading "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" together and I'm amazed at his reading skills.  It sounds like his class is also starting to tackle multiplication.  Wow! 

One milestone of note this week - Reina told me to "chill out mom."  I've been worried about the respiratory virus that's running around the country.  Between Croup Girl and mildly Asthmatic Boy, respiratory bugs make me a little nervous.  Will caught a cold last weekend and had a cough for a while that was making me nervous.  He felt much better by the middle of the week and I was asking him how he was feeling (for the 50th time) when Reina told me to chill out.  Sadly, she was right. 

The grown-ups in the Pauley family are working, hunting (well one of us) and trying to keep the chaos to a minimum.  September is one of my favorite months and I'm trying to enjoy as much of it as I can.  Those cold, dark winter days are right around the corner.