Summer Nights

Do you remember the summer nights of your youth?  Staying up late.  Capturing lightning bugs.  Being called in by mother hollering out the backdoor and hearing the other mothers doing the same for their children all over the neighborhood.  Hearing the tree frogs, locusts, and crickets through the open windows while laying in bed after scrubbing off a day's worth of dirt from your bare feet.  Smelling the heaviness of the evening air.  Watching heat lightning.  Dreaming of all the new places to explore, forts to build, friends to meet back up with the next day to start all over again.  Last night I captured one of those moments through the eyes of the boys. 

Watch 'em wriggle!

As a treat I took them to purchase some heavily discounted fireworks to set off over the lake and in the driveway before bed.  For all of you who are now cringing and questioning my sanity, we did have plenty of discussions about fire safety, proper uses for the lighters, horror stories of children who misuse fireworks and lighters and the seriousness and great privilege of being able to do what they were doing.  Don't we all remember being given privileges and how that made us feel grown up and actually caused us to grow up at the same time?  Anyway, they had reached their fireworks quota for the night--they were spacing them out to have a few every night.  I started picking off bag worms from the hedges out front.  The boys decided to burn them with the lighters.  Boys.  They liked watching them wriggle.  H even stacked a firecracker on top of them and lit it to see what would happen.  I kept thinking that this was homeschooling at its finest.  Experimenting.  Hands on.  Forming a hypothesis and testing it.  Biology too.  I know that these will be nights that they remember.  I hope that they have the blessing of watching their children soak up the feelings of summer nights and have fond memories.