Heading into the Labor Day weekend, summer is distinctly in the rear-view mirror. The first two images are last looks at Peacham Pond -- the girls holding hands as they walk down the lane, and Maggie with her mother down on the dock. Next up is Maggie sporting a bowler hat, well really a bowl for a hat. On a visit to Chambersburg, the girls clamber about Eagle Rock, having ridden in backpacks on a hike that we took 15 years earlier on the morning of our wedding. And speaking of such conveyances, that is the girls' first official unprompted word: "backpack." They will say mama and dada and baby and Bea and (sort of) Maggie and a few other words with prompting, but the sight of a backpack elicits a gleeful "ba-pa." Backpacks also work pretty well as frontpacks for short walks to the park but with their combined weight now 45 pounds -- Maggie holding a four-pound lead on her sister -- the emphasis is on short.
