Prescribed fire party!

A month since my last post -- I guess that's testament to the fact that I can't handle teaching four mornings a week and blogging simultaneously. I'm loving my new little gig as a pre-k teacher between that and shuttling Will back and forth to kindergarten each day, I feel busier than ever.

Still I can't bid goodbye to August without marking a couple milestones in photos. (Due to some technical difficulties, you'll be viewing photos out of order and before the rest of the text because old "blogger" is being stubborn for me right now and won't let me move pictures or even cut and paste text.)

First, Will sets out for his first day of kindergarten (where he has settled in happily with a great teacher):

And Will's sixth birthday party. When he told Rob and I that he wanted a "prescribed fire party," we couldn't help but laugh to ourselves. But it turned out to be a pretty cool concept, since Rob happened to have done a prescribed burn a couple days prior to the party and had access to a "fire engine" that normally lives in another part of the state. I held my breath and invited Will's entire kindergarten class, but only one of them came (perhaps because I seemed like some kind of nutcase with our prescribed fire party theme). With a few longtime friends, it made for a perfectly sized party.

When Will wrote his list of party plans, the first item on his agenda was "Bring the team." So luckily Rob's co-worker Trevor came to assist.

First we did a little tour of the wildlife of the Chattahoochee Valley in our living room that included a stuffed wild turkey and red-tailed hawk, a deer skull and a gopher tortoise shell -- plus some photos of fire-dependent species from red-cockaded woodpeckers and fox squirrels to indigo snakes and pitcher plants. Then the party-goers got to watch Rob light some pine straw on fire with a drip torch and douse the flames with a flapper and a backpack sprayer. And the kids took turns spraying water from the fire engine hose. Finally, Rob deployed an expired fire shelter and we played "see how many party guests can fit under a fire shelter meant for one."

Now Owen's already plotting a batman birthday for next July, and, well, that just doesn't sound as fun.