Has anyone noticed how this feature used to be Saturday Morning Chat and now it is Saturday Afternoon Chat? If you haven’t, that’s what happened. I used to write this post on Fridays but I always seem to forget to finish it until Saturday morning now so it goes up on Saturday Afternoon instead.

Autumn came to our area this week and that meant more mornings with a cup of tea sweetened with local honey and more evenings curled up under a blanket while I wrote or read a book.

I had been out of peppermint tea, which is my comfort tea, but ordered a box online. It was a tea that wasn’t my normal organic tea.

Imagine my disappointment when it had no taste whatsoever. It was the weirdest thing and I’ve decided to no longer order tea off Amazon. Luckily, The Husband picked me up my normal tea yesterday, and that first cup was much better and just in time for the cooler weather.

It’s funny because I really wanted autumn to come but now that the weather has cooled down, I find myself melancholy over how quick summer went by and how we didn’t do as much as I wish we had as a family.

We did spend time together and go to the pool a lot but we did not have any big trips and that was disappointing. We can always plan for trips other times in the year, of course.

I also feel bad that a lot of people really rushed summer this year. I don’t know why people wanted the coziness of fall again but online there were YouTubers and others sharing how much they wanted it to be fall. I don’t remember the fall craziness being as intense in other years.

Maybe people just want to escape people again because so many people in the world today are miserable and rude. I don’t know that that is why I wanted autumn to come. I just like being cozy and not feeling so rushed all the time to get outside and enjoy the nice weather like I do in summer. Yet, I will miss being able to get outside more and enjoy the weather. Little Miss and I stayed inside too much on some days this summer, but neither of us enjoys the high humidity, which we had a lot of this year.

You can tell the weather is getting cooler, by the way, because our cats Pixel and Scout are getting a lot cuddlier. They want to lay on my chest and Scout is back to laying on our daughter’s pillow most nights. One night this week she stayed there the entire night but then left after she threw up. *Cue sarcasm alert* Good times. I love cleaning up cat puke at 7:30 in the morning and also taking a couple of tiny pieces out of our daughter’s hair. Ew.

Luckily that’s the first time that’s happened.

Last night the upstairs was very humid so we ran our air conditioner and fan. While reading to Little Miss, I noticed all three animals had  taken up residence on the bed.

A few changes are coming to our family this autumn, the main one being that The Boy is attending a career center two and a half hours a day every day during the week.

He rides a bus from our small town to another small town twenty minutes away for the class.

He, Little Miss, and I are the night owls in the family and it’s been an adjustment the last couple of days with him needing to go to bed early and get up early. I miss our late nights together because that is when he is the chattiest.

The Husband is also used to his quiet, early mornings when he gets ready for work but now The Boy is up with him. It’s thrown all of our schedules off a little bit, but we will get used to it. The career center class is an excellent opportunity and I am very grateful for the local school district helping us get him in to the center since it is usually for public school students.

The schools around here started Thursday, which I thought was really odd. It really didn’t give students very long to get used to their schedule before they were off a couple of days again. Usually they start on a Wednesday. I’m not sure why there was a change this year. Either way – school is underway again.

Little Miss and I started a very shortened version of homeschool on Wednesday and will get more serious about it this next week. We started with a little history and English.

I’ll start homeschool lessons with The Boy at a later date.

I figured I’d let him get used to getting up early again for school before we try to add math, history, and science to the Building and Construction class he’s taking at the career center. Homeschooling allows us to have a very flexible schedule and I know The Boy already misses that but I will be giving him plenty of time to relax when he returns from the career center before cracking the whip (a suggestion from my brother) and making him work on his other subjects.

It looks like Little Miss and I will be joining a homeschool co-op this year. She and I will meet with other homeschoolers once a week throughout the year. The only downside will be the increased chances of colds, but, well, we could also get them at the other events she will do throughout the school year – including Awana and gymnastics. Remember how I once wrote that I planned for autumn to be calmer? Yeah – apparently not, or at least not for two days out of the week.

Last Sunday we had our last official summer swim with Little Miss’s friends. The temperatures are supposed to go down this week so I don’t know if we will be able to have any more swim days. Sometimes we get in our last swim around or on Labor Day.

We certainly could have used a dip in the pool when the humidity jumped up yesterday. I thought the rise in humidity meant storms were coming but they never did. I was glad they didn’t because we had a lot of storms this summer and I suffer from silent migraines that affect my balance and cognitive state but luckily don’t often leave me with a headache.

Today I’m going to head to my parents to help clean. Tomorrow we will have another family day, but, again, probably no swimming.

Next week in addition to homeschooling I hope to be able to work on putting together my grandfather’s poems, maybe copying them into the computer so I can self-publish them for my family. We have piles of them that he wrote over the years – some of them to waitresses or people he met on his and my grandmother’s travels around the country. Eventually, I hope to share more of them on here.

This week I’ll also be in planning mode for my parents’ anniversary party in September. They will be married 60 years on September 8.

I want to say I also hope for some quieter days when I can watch some of my favorite slow-living YouTubers, read some books, and take photographs, but every time I’ve written this in the past, I’ve had a crazy week so I am afraid to jinx it.

I have a few blog posts started and hope to finish them and put them up on the blog this week. I really hope they are more exciting than this post has been today! *wink*

How was your week? Did you do anything fun? Let me know in the comments and visit the blog tomorrow to find out what I have been reading, watching, writing, listening to, and taking photos of.

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