I spent a half an hour working outside on the porch before the weather drove me inside. Despite my socked feet and sweatshirt, I was too cold. May I just point out that it is August. In Chicago. I don�t think it�s yet hit 70 degrees here today. I love this.

I got up early and drove a couple of miles to a park which has the perfect mix of prairie and woods, hills and flatlands for hiking. I returned home to find AJ and his dad tearing around the yard with a whiffle ball and bat. We all decided to blow off the morning and piled into the car and drove to another park. While my husband went for a run, AJ and I explored our favorite nature center. We admired the resident ferret and rabbit, watched turtles swimming laps in their tank, and were alarmed when we noticed the acrylic beehive was not only allowing us to view the bees bringing in their haul to stash in honeycombs, but was also allowing bees to seep into the room. We took refuge in the butterfly house, where a newly hatched monarch butterfly tumbled out of its cocoon and onto the back of my hand, its wet wings useless for flight. He crawled up and down my arm, to AJ�s fascination, and showed no interest of taking up any other residence. I finally managed to lure him onto a leaf of plumbago so that we could venture outdoors where an extremely large hill was clearly waiting for us to roll down it. After my husband returned, we headed down to the large pond to search for bullfrogs among the cattails. We walked out onto a small pier where a father and his son, perhaps a year older than AJ, were fishing. While we watched, the little boy caught his very first fish, a tiny sunfish. The boy was so proud that he ran right over to us with his catch, jumping up and down saying, �I caught a fish! I caught a fish!� His father pulled out a disposable camera and took his picture with the fish. The boy cried and cried when he was told he had to let the fish go back in the water.

We hiked around the side of the pond and over to the baseball field, where AJ insisted on playing pretend baseball, running four laps around the bases before he tired out. My husband hoisted him on his shoulders and we continued on up the steep hill behind the field, through a grove of trees to where the path opens up onto a wide expanse of sloping prairie, full of colorful wildflowers. We reluctantly headed back toward the parking lot, stopping to have a snack at a picnic table not far from our car. It was a lovely morning.

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