summertime and we don't need to sleep

I think that's my kids motto.
They've been staying up later and later.
every night.
And still getting up before 8am.

They are active all day long - out the door riding bikes by 9am
swimming
playing
running
not eating - heavens no - haven't got time for that mum, gotta go go go go go - unless one of my friends invites me for lunch in which case then eating seems like a fun and wonderful thing but otherwise no.
Snacking. Yes.

Snacking is different from eating lunch. Snacking involves something in a little bag that is portable and can be eaten with one hand whilst riding a bike.

the evil ice cream man continues to come around nearly every day......right before dinner. That's another snack.
Duncan runs in and spends his own money - always gets a chocolate cone dipped in sprinkles for $2.75.
Sometimes I buy it for him, and sometimes he buys his own.
Either way - it means that dinner time goes over about as well as lunch.
It's light out until 9pm, but I make them come in at 8.

They are then supposed to have something to eat, get into jammies, and GO TO BED.
but this last part isn't happening.
They are not tired.
I don't know how they do it, because *I* am tired.

Why aren't they getting tired?
Are they saving it all up so that when they are teenagers I will be forced to stick dynamite under their bed in order to get them up for school?? Is that it??

Oh that reminds me - Matthew loves to play Rock Paper scissors. Duncan likes it too - and hates to lose.
Duncan is very bright and academic - but sometimes Matthew is just such a clever little bugger that it throws Duncan for a loop. They were playing Rock paper scissors, and Duncan kept winning so finally they did 1 - 2 - 3 and Duncan threw down rock and matthew did some brilliant move where he wiggled all his fingers and said "it's dynamite - and it beats rock!"
Oh my goodness - the resourcefulness. I laughed, because dynamite made Duncan quite upset because he couldn't beat it.

So then D. started using 'dynamite' and clever Matthew became water and put the dynamite out. - How funny is that?

And despite the constant fighting - they become super best buddies (solidarity at night) in the evening and ask for 'sleepovers' and play with each other until all hours. Duncan was out by 11pm and I just put Matthew back to bed - it's 11:56pm.

And now a random picture from the archives - because I had lost all my camera cards (4 x 2GB each) and was super peeved about it - not because of the cards, although I was mildly upset about that - but memory is cheap, and I'll have to get new memory when I get my new camera anyway because stupid NIKON cannot keep all their cameras with the same type of memory. So my D80 takes SD cards, and the D300 takes Compact Flash and since it looks like Nikon isn't about to change their higher end cameras over to SD anytime soon, I'll have to go with CF when I upgrade. All this to say:
I found my cards - and was so happy because there were pictures on there that I hadn't uploaded yet - Most of them from my best friends daughters b-day party in June.
So
Found the pictures - and here's one with our kids because it's funny and cute (Joey was grumping)