August was a full month, but not as rushed and crazy as July.

It kicked off with my mom’s birthday and a trip to a lake on the state game lands near us with some friends.

We spent a lot of time with my parents either eating dinner or playing in the pool or just enjoying the view. The kids helped dad pick vegetables out of the garden and The Boy helped my dad on various projects throughout the summer.

We also played in the water quite a bit.

We went to the Outhouse Races in town.

The Husband worked a lot, including attending a press conference with the president one day during this last week of the month at a college a couple of hours away.

The most exciting thing about that to my husband (besides some really odd mix-ups uttered by the prez) was the university band, who was performing some nice jazz numbers.

During the last two weeks, I have watched the leaves start to slowly turn orange, red, and yellow and that’s freaked me out a bit since I am not in the least ready for fall and feel I did not plan for school the way I had planned to do. Oh, I had grand plans. We were going to work on math for Little Miss and do a bit of math for The Boy so he isn’t just being tossed into it next week, but alas, we followed the path of other summers and only had fun instead.

Looking ahead to September, school starts for us on Tuesday, and I know the kids are not excited about it, but they are resigned to it and may even be glad to get back into a bit of routine. Scrap that last part. They hate routine and school! Who am I kidding? It’s me that is looking forward to getting back into a routine and maybe a little bit to school again.

There will be plenty of learning going on, including from this mom who likes learning along with the kids. I especially enjoy the history and literature, but have even found math and science fun at times.

I hope to finish writing my current book (The Shores of Mercy) and reading a few others this month as well. I’m sure we will watch plenty more Brokenwood Mysteries, a couple more other mystery shows (most likely all British as we haven’t found any American mystery shows we actually like), a few movie classics (including a couple more Paul Newman movies I couldn’t fit in for my Summer of Paul), and take some walks in the falling leaves. We will also be home more since we have math, reading, history, and science to learn for school and this excites me because there is nothing more delightful than telling someone I am unavailable to do something I didn’t want to do in the first place because we have school.

As for reading, I have a huge list I’d love to tackle.

The Husband picked up a Garrison Keillor fiction book at one of those “little libraries” for me and I also have another stack of books I haven’t been able to dig into yet, plus a huge list on Kindle.

On Kindle, I am currently reading Junkyard Dogs: A Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson.

This month I hope to read or finish:

High Adventure by Donald Westlake

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis,

Savage Run by CJ Box,

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

And Death Ever After by Eva Gates

I also hope to toss some lighter reads in there. We will see how it goes. I almost never read as many books as I plan on.

I guess I should mention that my birthday is also in September but I’m going to be old this year so, well, I’m trying to forget about it. My parents are also celebrating their 59th wedding anniversary on September 8.

How about you?

What are your plans for September and how did your August go?