I'm going to skip right over our summer adventures in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Cape Cod and come back to those in a few months. Instead, I'm picking up on the chronicles of "Donny-a" (get it? so lame) with the evening that we returned home to Iowa from our summer travels. It was Sunday, August 16th (incidentally, my mother's 60th birthday). We were greeted by a hot house. Peter had turned off the central air ten days earlier when he left to join us on the Cape, and the result was a warm stuffy house. So warm, in fact, that we flirted with the idea of staying in a hotel that night (what's one more night away from home?). But in the end we sucked it up and waited for the house to cool down and learned that we really need to start using our programmable thermostat better.
On the positive side, the boys wanted to sleep in the same room, so they slept in Sam's room that night. They'd shared a room and sometimes a bed for the past seven weeks, and it was sweet that they weren't ready to stop doing that yet.
And they did it again the next night, this time in John's room, where there's a roll-out trundle bed.
(You can't really see him, but he's up in the top bunk.)
(How cute is Sam sleeping in this hooded blanket?)
The pets were all glad to be home again too. I think they missed me over the summer and it was good for life to get back to normal for them.
{Note Brody in the background. Once the dogs start wrestling, he was out of there. Smart cat with a good sense of self-preservation!}
Peace for Brody on the patio...
Unpacking didn't take me as long this year, and I didn't get the end-of-summer blues that I usually get. The seasonal allergies were there but they weren't as bad because I started taking Claritin as soon as we got home. School started a week after we got back so we had that to get ready for.
All in all, it was a pretty smooth transition back to real life (much better than last year's!).
