It's still very, very sunny.

You must excuse us, we are very busy and important people these days. Winter is coming, so we're trying to find all the Indoor Things To Do. We found the Children's Discovery Museum, which is just an enormous room full of toys.

This bit was mostly my doing.

Mostly, though, we've been poolside. Our neighborhood pool closed last weekend, so we spent most of last week up to our pint-sized armpits in it.

OR coloring on the pavement, and chalking up our bums.

That pink is just part of the swimsuit now.

We went to the Berry Barn on the weekend, but berry-picking season is apparently over. Dog season is in full swing, however.

As is wooden truck season.

We got a waffle on the way out, and you only get one trip to the toppings bar so Joel went pretty hard.

Eleanor was into it, obviously

and sometimes I like to recap the day with her, so on the way home I asked her if she'd had a waffle and she was like

Too right I did.

With our neighborhood pool closed, we've been going to King's River Landing, and despite a string of obscenely hot days, the morning Josie and I picked to walk down there with our kids, it was rainy and grey. We were like, Ugh, weather, and the kids were like, WE CAN FILL THESE BAGGIES WITH WATER.

Also, I know this is sort of the point of a garden, but food is growing in my yard.

Hooray for summer.

Other Thoughts on Camping (Or: Eleanor Eats)

Eleanor helps set up.

Eleanor gets a ride to the lake because seriously, just leave the rocks.

Eleanor eats black beans from a camping mug.

Eleanor dances on the beach.

Snuggles begins to get really, really dirty.

Eleanor roasts a hot dog.

Eleanor eats a hot dog

and then some chili, because she cannot be trusted with chili dogs.

Eleanor doesn't care.

Raych makes a s'more after Eleanor has gone to bed, and eats it in peace.

Eleanor eats blueberries from a camping mug because she is too impatient to wait for morning skillet.

Eleanor eats skillet.

Eleanor eats her wrap like a proper human for, like, two seconds.

Eleanor reverts to her usual gustatory method of tearing things apart to make sure nothing suspicious has gotten in.

Eleanor eats a roasted marshmallow.

Eleanor is told to wipe her face, and is like, Wipe feets?

Eleanor is again told to wipe her face, and is like, Hat!

Joel roasts a marshmallow that looks like a roasted turkey.

Eleanor eats camping oatmeal.

Eleanor helps clean up so we can go home.

No she does not.

We did more at Waskesiu than just sleep.

Like, a lot more. Eleanor really got into the whole camping experience. She is much changed from last year's camping trip, but she still really really likes rocks.

Like, a lot. Any time you let her walk wherever you're going, you have to allow an extra time and and a half for her to be like, Hold up, here's a rock.

Also, hey, I found a stick.

We were camped a ten-minute walk from Waskesiu Lake, which is exactly like Cultus Lake only with fewer people and sandier beaches and no mountain run-off, so the water is actually WARM by August, and fun to be in.

Lake-weed: even better than sticks because it wobbles.

We were at the lake for large bits of every day.

It was absurdly idyllic.

On our one full day (like, neither the day we arrived nor the day we left) we went into town to check out the museum, which we'd heard was Not Bad.

It was free, so it was definitely worth the price.

It was really just a few rooms of Old Things With Explanatory Labels, Plus Chairs Eleanor Wanted to Climb On

and a homesteader shack BUT the shack is where we found out about the Nature Center, which was UHHHHMEZZZZZING.

This is how we got to the Nature Center, which (given the size of Waskesiu) was really unnecessary, but HILARIOUS.

So we walk into the Nature Center and there's a big stuffed bison (not real), and Eleanor is right away like, I bless you, bison.

And I am like, Don't touch (because that is your default response to your child touching something in public) and the staff member is like, No, it's ok, she can touch EVERYTHING in here.

Eleanor touches a (real [dead]) fish.

Eleanor hugs a (real [dead]) fox.

Eleanor wears a wolf-leg fur (with foot attached), about which she is uncertain.

She also poked her fingers in a stuffed beaver's eye, patted a stuffed bear, kept referring to a stuffed wolf as 'Georgie,' and wore a dear-face mask.

What I'm saying is, if you are ever in Saskatoon and feel like camping and have an animal-loving, super-handsy toddler, you want to go to the Nature Center in Waskesiu.

Sleeping in a tent, like a boss.

So! Camping. Hey, remember last summer when we took Eleanor camping and she was excellent at it until night fell and then she was totally terrible? And we ended up packing everything into the car in the dark hours and driving home for the night? REMEMBER THAT?

It looked like this.

So, I really wanted to camp for several days this time. Like, two, even. I wanted to wake up in the tent and go make camping coffee over the fire and eat campfire skillet. I wanted to come home smelling like campfire and with melted marshmallow over everything. I wanted to camp.

And Eleanor is the type of person who likes to know what everything is and what it's called and what it is used for. I'm realizing that a lot of parenting is just knowing your child's personality and WORKING with it. So we checked out a bunch of books about camping and talked a lot about sleeping bags and tents. And she practiced.

She practiced rolling around in her sleeping bag and getting used to the texture, and then practiced actually SLEEPING in it, and then practiced sleeping in it IN her camping bed.

By the time we got to Waskesiu and set up the tent, she was so jazzed on the idea that for the first half hour of her first nap, all we could hear from outside the tent was 'Sleep a TENT! Sleep a SLEEPING BAG! Sleep a LI'L BED!' And then finally, silence.

So that part went well. She slept like a tank until almost seven every morning, sleeping right through our coming into the tent once the fire died down, and leaving the tent in the dark hours to go pee, and coming back into the tent. Coming and going from a tent is such a noisy business.

She even slept through the baby in the campsite next to ours that cried every 20 minutes between 8 and midnight, and then again between 4 and 7. She slept through the family of ratty, ill-behaved children that replaced the crying baby on the second night, children who wouldn't stop shooting their laser guns right by our tent, children whose mother kept threatening to take them straight home and then NOT DOING SO until Joel and I stopped getting our hopes up.

And then she'd wake up in the morning, fresh as a daisy, and stand up in her crib all, I see you! Like, how hilarious, here you two are in my room, still sleeping. Let's get up now, I have rocks to collect.