Backyard Story Time

This is it... the LAST Saturday before school starts. The last day of no deadlines or alarm clocks... the last play day before its time to get down to business. We started out our day at Jaxon's best buddy's birthday party at the jump house. Both kids had a blast and it was so much fun to see all of our school friends. It actually made me *almost* excited to get back to school... although I'd really rather keep Jaxon at home with me forever :) We spent the rest of the day doing boring prep work to get ready for the big week ahead... laundry, errands, chores etc... It was really rather boring and I couldn't let our last Saturday from the summer of '11 go out like that so we brainstormed and came up with what we thought was the perfect way to wind our summer up. So we rounded up some supplies and and set out to make one more mini adventure.

First we grabbed some glow sticks and ball jars to make firefly lanterns. The kids had a lot of fun snapping and shaking and giggling as they filled their jars.

We decided that it was too hot to start a fire in the fire pit, but no backyard story time could be complete without s'mores, so we made "S'mores on a stick."  Almost as yummy and not nearly as sticky :)

Then we picked out a few of our favorite books, grabbed pillows and blankets and headed outside.

I could listen to him read for hours. Seriously. I love listening to him. I love that he loves to read to his sister. I love that he really gets lost in a good story.  

Jaxon treated us to a couple of stories and then he was off to play in his playset.

Little sister was right behind him, giggling and making up stories about their lanterns the whole time. They pretended that they were everything from fireflies to fairies. Dillyn was pretty sure the green one was tinkerbell herself.

We read the rest of our books, gazed at the stars and thanked God for this beautiful night and our wonderful summer.