Sunrise....Sunset

We are still waiting for summer weather, but the length of our days are summer-like. The sun rises at around 5:00am; which means at least one child usually rises at this time as well. The difficult thing to adjust to is the sunset. It is beautiful and it is at 10:00pm . The pic above was taken at 10 from our patio. Dusk at 10. The 8:oo bedtime is a bit of a joke for the munchkins--- they end up sitting in their beds reading books for 45 minutes unless they are worn out. M doesn't seem to care if it is light or not because he still naps during the day (although he is shortening naps). D and I are staying up later and later because it feels quite silly to get in bed at 9:30 when the sun is up. D read that we have an average of 17.5 hours of sunlight during the summer. This changes gardening a great deal as well; areas that I thought would get an hour of light before sunset are getting 4-5 hours of light. It also seems to confuse animals that hunt at dawn and dusk. We had a bobcat on our patio one morning. It was small but still very surreal to walk to the window to see whose cat is there and see the "cat" with tufted ears and a bobbed tail running away. It makes me wonder how many times we missed him; E has said several times at breakfast that "Something just ran across the patio" but we wrote it off as squirrels or imagination. There aren't that many squirrels here, or housecats that are allowed to wander, or rabbits (no loss there)and between coyotes that we hear at night and our friend bobcat I think we know why.
love and hugs and think of us when you see a sunset or a bobcat,
B