Drought

We've been having a drought here in Kansas ever since we moved here.  Whereas the first time we moved here I marveled at how it could just pour rain, this time around I'm marveling at how little moisture has dropped from the sky in the course of a year.  Even the trees are affected by the heat and lack of rain.  At this point, the grass is so dead that the kids decided one day it might make a good sledding surface.

It worked surprisingly well, actually.

It is also so dry that underneath that grass is a fair layer of dusty dirt.  Now that the triple digits heat spell has broken, the kids are loving playing outside with all their friends again.  Every night the kids come in covered head to toe with dirt, dirt, dirt.  I took a picture of our bathtub one night after three dusty kids bathed in it (okay, so it looked MUCH worse in real life!):

And in other news...

Across the street from our house is a park.  That park has a lot of trees (deciduous forest is the natural landscape here). Alongside those trees and the road is a winding little sidewalk.  At one point, the sidewalk is quite slanted toward the down slope of the trees, almost like the sidewalk just might slide into the wooded area one day.  It takes just a little more effort to push a jogging stroller past these 10 or so squares of sidewalk.

Today Eli was riding his bike in front of me as I pushed the stroller.  He was going pretty fast and apparently on this slanted section, his bike started steering him down the slope.  In his own words, "I slammed on my brakes as hard as I could but I just couldn't stop!"  He rode down into the trees about twenty feet before he slammed into a tree that brought him to a stop.  The poor kid was scared so bad he was shaking!  He has scrapes all over his face, neck, and arms.  Poor guy!