I'm so brave. Lemme tell ya.

Well, I smell like a campfire which is awesome, considering that I’ve been playing with fire and I looooove to play with fire. I have a fire pit in my backyard that I built all by myself, so we had a fire outside with hot chocolate and s’mores. I'm a complete stop pyro. I love fire. I love my fire pit. I have a hammock near it and some nice lounge chairs surrounding it.

I have found that fire is excellent bribery, too. See, pyromania is apparently hereditary, so the shorties will clean up their toys in the yard so that we can have a bonfire. Well… not so much a “bonfire” as a tame little fire in a small brick pit about 3 feet across (sized like the green sand box turtles that preschoolers have, because I can take the lid off the sandbox and put it on the firepit so that it doesn’t get rained in). Of course it's October, which is the driest month of the year in Alabama. We typically only have one day with rain in October; so this afternoon, when my children were supposed to be eating their lunch at the patio table, my daughter decided to get up and go get the hammock and put it in the storage room. I don't know why, other than she was doing whatever she could to not follow directions and eat her lunch. I had gone inside to check on something – I don’t even know what- and came out and saw that she had not eaten but she put away my hammock that I was about to lie in to read Frozen Heat. She had gotten the ropes all tangled up , so I gave her a speech about how to roll it up the right way and that she shouldn't have messed with it because it doesn't ever rain and October. Perhaps I was being a bit whiny and dramatic. Anyway, we cleaned up the yard, played, had dinner, started a fire, burned documents (because it's more fun than shredding them), and roasted marshmallows.

When the flames finally died down, I ushered the children inside, got them in bed, then grabbed my laptop and headed back out to watch the last few embers die down. I love watching embers, blowing on them and watch them sparkle… then I throw random things in it just to watch them flare up,  because I like fire. Have I mentioned that? I like fire. It’s pretty.

And then something started making noise behind me; not my dog and the neighbors moved away so no dogs there, but there was something in the yard moving around and that's always kind of freaky.

Especially  since, earlier,  I had  told my children that there were little monsters making noises in the mulch. They looked at me like I was crazy because it was very clearly something so small as a frog or maybe even a cricket… but this… this was bigger… maybe a possum, maybe a raccoon, but I couldn’t see it...so I froze and listened… And I could hear rustling… and it was getting closer… And I still couldn't see it…. I tried to use the laptop as a big flashlight, but I still didn't see anything back there… It got louder and was getting closer, but every time I stopped to look around, it would be still. It was starting to wig me out a little. It was going to bite me, give me rabies and chomp my skull into little pieces... I was about to come inside and then there was more noise above me, rattling, and something dropping near me -what the hell - then I realized what the new sound was… it was rain. Only a few sprinkles, but it was enough to make me feel like a douche for fussing at M for putting the hammock away when she saw clouds. And then the little bitty bird that was jumping around behind me went up into its tree and I came inside.

Happy fall, y'all!