Laundry list

First, thanks to everyone for the great eggplant recipes. I appreciate the input--cooking is definitely not my thing, so it's nice to get a bit of help.

Second, I'd like to remind everyone in the Erie area that it's Erie Blogs Week II at the Community Blood Bank this week. The blood drive was a big success last year, and we're hoping for an even better turn out this year. So come on down, save some lives, and get a chance to win an iPhone 3G. You can't beat that. Mike and I are donating tonight, because the CBB is open until 7:30 on Tuesdays. Hope to see you there!

In other news, the summer continues to fly by, racing quickly toward the first day of school. I feel like I'm in panic mode--all the activities we planned, all the fun we were going to have, and now it's down to a week. We have been having fun--we took the boys to Midway Park on Chautauqua Lake last week, and we spent Saturday evening at the Crawford County Fair. Not to mention the multiple family reunions in the past few weeks, and all the bike riding and playground hopping we've been doing--it's not like we've been slacking in the fun department. It's just that the summer, like so many other things, went faster than I expected.

Evan is ready for school to begin. He's started talking about it more, and I think he's getting excited. He saw one of his classmates at the park the other night, and he was over the moon--I think he's missed seeing all his friends every day. I've been noticing a lot of anxiety in him lately, but it hasn't really been about school. He's worried about tornadoes and fires and car accidents, about being alone, about things that are out of his control. I've been doing a lot of reading about this, and it seems to be perfectly normal at his age, but it's still a bit of a change for him. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Ev's also been telling me that his "brain is wild". He seems to have trouble winding down and relaxing--it seems like his mind is working all the time. He's constantly asking questions and talking about things, and the questions are getting harder and harder for me to answer. Suddenly he's asking about death and puberty and the rotation of the Earth. I try to give good answers, ones that are true but still easy for him to understand, but that's been challenging for me. It's like he just realized how big the world is, and he wants to know all of it. It's wonderful and exhausting.