Not so zippy

I'm discovering that blogging with just middle schoolers and up (as opposed to toddlers or preschoolers or even early elementary aged children) is a tough gig. In the past, when trying to come up with something to write, I could fall back on sharing some cute thing a child did or share some cute child pictures and call it a day. Now? All week long, most of the people around here have either spent their entire day with their nose in a book or building with Legos, alternating with going to the kitchen to get themselves a snack. It is a constant loop. Read or build, move onto snacking, back to reading or building. And while I can get away with one blog post about it (for instance, the one I am currently writing), a week or two of that would grow rather tedious. It is truly how they have all spent the summer. I'm not really complaining, because who complains about children who read constantly? But surely, every now and then, they could rise up from the couch and do something I could write about before descending back into the pillows, don't you think?

Even the animals aren't really pulling their blog fodder weight. I was looking back over some old posts and Gretel was a wealth of writing prompts. Kenzie? He is a good boy, but he is getting older and grayer and really what he likes to do best is sleep. Or bark at passing vehicles. Or bark at imagined intruders. But then, once the danger has passed, he goes back to taking a nap. Aster spends her days hanging out with Y. waiting for TM to come home. Her most interesting habit is to wait expectantly for a cat (usually Midnight) to drop food from the counter to her. 

Have you ever read the picture book, Verdi by Janell Cannon? It is about a little yellow tree python who loves to zip around and around doing crazy things while the older and more green snakes stare at him from their unmoving stillness. Eventually, through a series of mishaps, Verdi turns green and decides that it is just fine not to zip around anymore. I have often thought of this book as I have been raising children from zippy little toddlers to the practically inert teen. I'm afraid all my zippy little ones are quite so zippy anymore, and are definitely moving from a yellow to a green hue. Well, maybe not so much L. She still ran outside a few times today to jump on the trampoline despite the heat.