In my mind, August means harvest season, and this was certainly a month of that. It was also a month of WORK. I spent a lot of time in the camper working on our light renovation. Unfortunately, I’m not posting before and after photos, since it’s still a work in progress. But plenty of harvest photos!

The first week of August was a huge week for painting, but I also managed to pick some local blueberries, plus harvest greens and radishes from the garden!

Kyle did capture me hard at work in the camper, I actually tracked my time for this project and I’ve logged around 40 hours of painting. It was a beast of a project.

This is wildly belated, but we finally got our anniversary photos done. I’ve been kinda scared to put on my wedding dress since having a baby. It’s a tight fit around the rib cage, but I survived. Next year is our tenth anniversary!

A good friend of mine invited us over to watch the honey harvest, and that is a sticky, wonderful mess! Honey processing seems to be like any harvest and preservation: a big day with some heavy lifting, but totally worth it to enjoy that sweet, sweet honey all year long!

We normally take a walk at least once a day, but when it’s too rainy or too hot, we sometimes take a drive just to get out of the house. We drove down a nearby forest road (part of the national forest here) and I stepped out to see how the blackberries were doing. Quite tasty!

There’s a wild cherry tree in our front yard that keeps me up on windy nights. Part of the trunk is dead, and it’s right outside our bedroom window. This month, we had it taken down. It was really fascinating to watch, they took it straight down using a bucket truck and a chainsaw. They didn’t hit the house, we didn’t have to move the camper out of the driveway, and the whole process took less than an hour. Now we have some great smelling firewood seasoning for next year!

We decided to take our walk by the lake that evening, and had some epic views. We used to live on this lake and have watched a thousand sunsets here. It’s beautiful.

Atlas discovered that he can open cabinet doors, and now the pantry is his walk-in closet. We put child-proofing on some of the cabinets, but left this one for him to explore.

On our daily walks, we wander down a quiet street full of friendly neighbors. One of them invited us to his retirement party, and boy do they know how to throw a party. We said our goodbyes a little early so we could put the kid to bed, and we could very clearly hear the band from our house. Kyle even went back to enjoy the music and get to know our neighbors a little better.

The garden finally started producing some real food, the cucumbers took off and then the cherry tomatoes started ripening about a dozen at a time. Atlas doesn’t like too many vegetables yet, but he loves cucumbers and pickles!

Some lovely hot weather put us off our daily walk schedule, so we decided to check out the lake instead. Atlas got his toes wet and then some! Poor boy, his shorts hang down to his ankles. The sizing of baby pants seems to be totally random, and we don’t always guess right!

One night, every time I woke up I could smell skunk, and it was very strong. In the morning, the whole house smelled like skunk. I walked outside and – no odor. CRAP. That means we have a skunk living under our house. I’d be inclined to let nature take its course, but we have hired a company to install new gas lines for us and they’ll be crawling all over under the house. Kyle set up a live trap and…one day there was a skunk in it. Uh, what was step 2?

Apparently they are sleepy during the day, and if you cover the trap, that calms them down. But…you have to get close to the trap to cover it. I told Kyle if he got sprayed I was going to take the baby and go live in my parents basement.

He got the trap covered and into the bed of the truck. He took the skunk a couple miles away and set it free. Somehow he didn’t get sprayed! You can see the skunk’s tail in the center of the photo, above the trap. It was cute, waddling away.

We also renovated the main bathroom in our house this month. Plus, we’ve got a big birthday party that we’re planning! Somebody is about to turn 1! We’re hoping September has a little more adventure to it than August did, but we still have a lot of work to do in the camper before we can take it out. We’ll get there when we get there. In the meantime, we’ll enjoy this summer weather for as long as it lasts!