Summer: NH, Thurs. 7/8

Rained all day. In the morning, the girls and I headed out for as exciting a shopping excursion as this area offers--Walmart, Dollar Tree, and Books a Million. They love BAM a ridiculous amount, with its collection of kawaii plush and small but satisfactory selection of middle-grade books. They wanted to spend the entire day there, reading. Alas, I eventually made them leave (but bought them each a book to ease the betrayal). New markers and sketchpads from Walmart made this a fruitful outing (along with mouse bait and ant traps; see below). 

We played a lot of games in the afternoon (Chinese checkers, pickup sticks, Memory, Rummikub); read a lot of Harry Potter 6 out loud while the kids colored; and did math review. We all read a lot. Lucia worked on a story she's writing. 

After dinner (steak on the grill; mozzarella and tomatoes), we took a walk in the rain to the top of the road. We saw four red efts--our first efts of the summer. Andrew took some pictures of us in front of the old barn (not the barn by the house; the other old barn. The older barn.).

Last night, after I posted here, turned out to be exciting--long after we assumed the girls were asleep, Lucia called downstairs in a panic: she'd seen a mouse run down the hallway, into the bathroom. We went up, looked around, encouraged them to go back to sleep. A few minutes later, another panicked call: she'd seen another mouse, running down the hall and into the linen closet. I'm surprised they actually agreed to go back to bed after that. I added mouse bait to the Walmart shopping list. I guess the snakes didn't eradicate the mice after all.

The other spooky thing that happened last night was that when Andrew took Farrah out at night, he heard a bunch of coyotes howling/barking really really close to the house. Farrah was terrified, barked into the darkness, then fled to the house without even peeing. Usually she's like a baby camel and won't go out at night here AT ALL (I mean, who can blame her); this experience will not change her mind. She likes it up here until the second the sun goes down.