I was awake early this morning and looked out the back windows to see the sun slanting into the backyard illuminating the deck and garden. The colours seems particularly beautiful. Sometimes I wonder if I garden just because I love to take pictures of it so much.

I can’t remember what started it but a little while ago Maisie became very excited about going camping and making a fire. Specifically, she wanted us to cut a tree down, build a camp fire and cook marshmallows. She even picked up a bag of marshmallows at the grocery store and put them in my cart for me. We weren’t going to be cutting down any trees but we were happy to go out for a picnic as soon as we had a nice evening. We went out right after work with a couple of quick stops to pick up Abby and a few picnicking necessities (though I completely forgot the condiments). Maisie had collected some sticks on our walk home the day before and she brought them for the campfire too.

Abby was very happy to be running around outside. Somehow, very thankfully, she completely missed a bit of excitement when a fox trotted past our fire pit and stopped to watch us for a moment. I suspect she was too interested in Maisie’s hot dog. We put the leash on until we were sure the fox was gone. Maisie could hardly wait to get through eating hot dogs so she could get out the marshmallows. I was a little worried about her catching one on fire, freaking out, flailing around, and hitting someone with flaming sugar but this was a completely baseless worry. Maisie’s method of cooking marshmallows involves putting a marshmallow on a stick, carefully placing it at the edge of the fire, watching it intently for ten or fifteen second, declaring it done and eating it. Only one of her marshmallows even started to turn golden and I think she made Rob eat it because it was over done.

When Rob was picking up stuff for dinner he also got one of those tin foil popcorn poppers to try out. We’d never used one before so we really weren’t sure what we’d end up with and it turned out the fire was too far away from the grill to pop the corn evenly but it still kind of worked. It was a lot of fun anyway. Maisie was really excited about putting out the fire with Rob. She helped get each bucket of water from the lake and, when the fire was cool enough, got to help pouring water on the coals. Once the fire was out so were the bugs and I packed everything back into the car as quickly as I could while Maisie convinced Rob to let her go on the swing until I was done.

I’m hoping to go out overnight camping at least once this year but picnicking is a lot of fun and requires a lot less planning.

Sometimes Maisie leaves toys around the house and something about them just catches my attention. This little giraffe was left on the ottoman after a day of play. To me it looks like she’s getting ready to go somewhere. I’ve made several of these tiny doll diapers now. They are irresistible and so quick. I’m planning to post the pattern and a tutorial for them sometime but have to figure out how to make the pattern look a bit more presentable than the version I’m working from now.