July was a month of travels, punctuated by a big week of work. Early in the month, we spent a weekend in Berkeley Springs with our dear friends, the Howell-Brogan family, and Meagan and I celebrated our birthdays. Then the kids had a couple of weeks of summer camp. The second week was a "WoW" for Mommy: a Week of Work, the culmination of my summer of research in which I tried to bash my article into shape. I mostly succeeded, although it still isn't really finished. I hope to keep working on it after classes start and send it off by the end of the fall semester. During that week, Agatha had camp in the morning and a delightful babysitter in the afternoon, and Henry spent the week at Camp Shand. This is a wonderful YMCA-run camp out in the woods, around a lake, about 45 minutes drive from Lancaster. It is a sleep-over camp, but he participated in the day-camp this year. Each morning we dropped him off at the Y a couple of blocks from our house by 8 am, and he rode a school bus out to camp and spent the whole day swimming, playing games, doing arts and crafts and visiting the "Trading Post," then rode the bus back home where we picked him up at 5:30 pm. It made for excellent, long days in the office for Mommy, and he seemed to love it, too. Next year, maybe we'll try it for two weeks!
Then we left for 10 days of vacation. We spent the first two nights on a horse farm in Virginia. We had planned to spend a day at Colonial Williamsburg, but it was just too hot-- over 100 degrees and humid that day. And the farm with its chic little guesthouse was so comfortable. So we just stayed there, petted the horses, chased the chickens, played the guitar-- and the Wii video game-- and relaxed. Henry befriended three boys his age whose gran took him along for pizza and bowling. Then, we drove on down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a week of vacation on the beach.
We had a great week. It was super hot the first day, but after that it was manageable. The water was warm, although Agatha was too scared of the big waves to go in the beach right by our cottage. There was a state park a mile away on the calm, sound-side of the island, so we went there most days so the kids could wade way out on the sand bar and we could catch crabs and little fishes. One day we drove all the way down to Ocracoke Island on the end, taking the ferry there and back.
It was lovely, but as usual we were all ready to come home. Now it's Monday, August 6, and the internal calendar is turning from summer and beaches and novels back toward fall and school and classes. I don't lament it; I love school and I love the "back-to-school" time for my kids. The kids have two more weeks of morning camp so Michael and I can get back into the office and finish up summer projects and begin fall ones; Henry's first day of school is August 23. Plus, there's lots of canning to do before then! Housecleaning/redecorating and canning are the afternoon projects for the next two weeks, along with some trips to the library and the pool. (Henry is reading anything and everything now; his latest obsession is the "How To Train Your Dragon" series.) And very soon my little girl will be four!
