Ollie, Ollie Oxenfree!

With summer racing to an end and school looming on the horizon, we have been trying to squeeze all of our summer fun into the last few days. I have a few days off from work, so I want to have fun with the kids.

We have already been up north and out west. We went to the Science Museum a couple times and to the beach multiple times. So what is left to do this summer?

Play hide and seek.

The evenings have been cool and surprisingly humidity and bug free. Perfect for a real, outside hide and seek game. We usually aren't too active with the kids in the evenings because behavior seems to drastically plummet the later the kids are up. But the last few evenings have been too perfect to sleep through.

The kids, of course, hid first. Sweet Pea hid behind a tree right next to where I was counting. I may have pretended not to see her in the past, but she is six years old now. She has to learn how to hide.

When it was my turn to hide, I remembered the most important consideration when choosing an adult hiding place. Comfort. Because you always end up hiding for a long time since the kids like to 'search' in the same spots over and over again. So I chose a spot behind the wood pile, found a nice flat board to sit on, folded my arms and leaned back to nap (hide). True to form, the kids 'searched and searched' while my back got stiff. Number One Son tried the age old hide and seek trick of standing in the middle of the yard and yelling, "Found you, Dad!", hoping he would fool me into revealing myself.

Eventually, they accidentally wandered close enough to me to almost trip on my feet. Now it was my turn to seek again. The kids actually found good hiding places this time. It took me a while to find N1S, and I had to give up on Sweet Pea. It turns out SP employed a common hide and seek maneuver by changing her hiding place mid-seek. When I was seeking I checked the play house first and while my back was turned SP dove into the play house while I was combing the rest of the yard. When it was my turn to hide again, I thought about just going around the house and going inside to watch TV while they looked for me. I guess I didn't want to give that secret away quite yet.

These are truly the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. I want to keep the last week of summer low key but fun. We can find lots of things to do at home and have fun as a family. Next on the list, freeze tag, stuck in the mud and duck, duck, gray duck.

Here's a couple of pictures of the kids' trip up north to visit the fishing Gramma and Grampa.

So far it's been a great summer. Hopefully, we will end the summer in similar fashion. We have a trip to the State Fair planned next week. A laser tag birthday party for N1S. And lots of bike rides, picnics and bug catching.