Please, sir, I want s'more...

Since getting our fire pit, Rachel and Miriam have used it with their friends twice and we have used it as a family zero times. 

I guess, technically, we helped the kids each roast a marshmallow for a s'more over the weekend before giving the fire to the girls. But the littler kids have been desperate to have a fire pit night. 

"Cant we have a fire tonight?" they begged at dinner.

"No," Miriam said gruffly. "It's a school night."

"Ahem," Andrew cleared his throat to assert his dominance. "Sure. We can have a fire tonight."

Because who's parenting here, anyway?

So we called Grandpa to ask if he wanted to come over and then cleaned up from dinner and got ready to build a fire. Part of getting ready involved Andrew and Rachel driving to the store to pick up some more marshmallows and things...but we eventually got the fire going and the kids were so excited to sit around the fire, eat s'mores, and chat. 

Grandpa told us about his baptism day—when his mom filled his ears with Vaseline and cotton balls to keep them from getting wet because he'd only recently had "buttons" put in his ears (like tubes, I guess, but in the 60s) so he couldn't get his ears wet. He said he felt like he had Vaseline in his ears for days after that. 

We told some other stories, too, about his first few times driving—and getting passed on the highway by a car full of nuns, much to Grandpa Frank's chagrin. 

Phoebe was a bit of a menace and wanted to play in the fire, but no one would let her and that made her feel grumpy. She was up all day (from 8:30 am or so until...she took a 15 minute nap around 2 pm...and then she was up until about 12:30 am...and I don't know how we're ever supposed to get anything accomplished around here). I thought for sure she'd be easy to put to bed tonight because we spent all day outside...but clearly I was wrong.

Anyway, here's this picture of Alexander, who got a little bit sticky:

When we sent them inside to get ready for bed, Zoë screamed into the darkness, "Best night ever!"

So I think it's safe to say that they had a good time.

And you can see that Alexander is in shorts and a t-shirt. We're nice and warm here!

And as people are wont to do in the south, our kids switched from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat just that fast. It wasn't even hot today. It was lovely. I kept having to remind the children of that as I'd chase them out of the house (again and again). 

"But we're hot!"

"It's not hot. It's lovely."

Seriously, what are they going to do when it really gets hot? And do you think I can safely put away our winter things—hats, gloves, etc? We've hardly needed them this year, but I don't really want to jinx anything...