You can call it fall if that's what you please.

We've been spending a lot of time outside, now that the days aren't quite so blistering hot and Eliot is steady enough on his feet to wander about the yard and push his shopping cart back and forth and up and down the driveway. My uncle gave Eliot three pumpkins from his garden yesterday, so we've been stacking the pumpkins up in his shopping cart, hauling them across the driveway, and unloading them on the neighbors' bench, then repeating the same over and over again. Eliot likes to pick them up one by one, straining with all his little toddler might, and then throw them and yell "uh-oh"as though their wobbly rolling down the driveway were some unexpected accident.

The neighbors are on vacation and we've been bringing in their mail, so I figure we're well within our rights to use their bench and play in their landscaping rocks. First he was having fun just pouring a cupful of rocks from one cup to the other, but today Eliot got the brilliant idea to try to put rocks in his ear. Because, as you all know, bodily orifices make great storage space for objects we might want to play with later.

I can just imagine the consultation with the ENT specialist after Eliot's surgery on Wednesday: "Well, ma'am, when we began to insert the tubes, we found that your son's ear is actually full of gravel." Ah-ha! Suddenly everything makes so much sense.







(His shirt, compliments of Aunt Lecia, reads, "My parents are exhausted." And, oh, is that the understatement of the year.)