Summertime?

Today Markus ran out in the downpour of rain in his swimsuit and sat in the puddles!

Right before the second downpour, I had dinner all ready set up outside.

I am trying to take better care of my roses this year, so I was outside trimming them and decided that I wanted to put some in a vase for the table. I was mopping the floors inside before though, and thought about coming outside while I had a bucket of Lysol to clean off the table and BBQ.

Markus asked if he could take over, because he is trying to earn some money to buy an air soft gun like the one that Max got for his birthday. He did a great job and not only cleaned off the table and grill, but the fence, garbage can, umbrella pole and stand, slide and railings. He was so proud of himself when he was finished.

Max was busying himself shooting down hornet nests with the afore mentioned air soft gun.

Morgen has been sick with the flu since Sunday and when he finally woke up this morning at 10:00, he came downstairs to find a HUGE spider in the bathroom. When I came home from teaching skating, he had taken a picture of it, measured it (it was bigger than a quarter) and compared the photos with some on the Internet of a brown recluse.

I was reading on one of my friends blogs last night about how she was ready for summer. But she took a while to reach that point. She said, about the kids being home from school, "my sanctuary becomes a bustling metropolis of summer vacation mayhem. My secret life without the children will be over soon." I was thinking about what she said, and it really hit me. I do have a secret life without my children. Albeit a short one, with Markus in Kindergarten half the day. But next year, he will be in school all day, for six hours.

She also said,

“And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the kids for three whole months. So
I settled for talking to myself, which is often pleasant enough, but can
sometimes feel too one-sided when you need advice. If you ask yourself, What do
you think? you usually already know the answer and wind up where you started.
It’s like an awkward first date. What do you want to do? I don’t know. What do
you want to do? This was one of those times. When it became apparent that
my husband found Yahtzee more interesting than my whining, I gave up and went to sleep. After all, I hadn’t expected him to come up with any real solutions to my
summer problem. I just wanted him to commiserate. But I had forgotten that to
him, working full time as he does, summer is just a change of temperature, not a
change of pace. But to me, summer means the end of one part of my life and the
return of another. For the last eight months I’ve spent my time living like a
teenager during summer break, doing—or not doing--exactly (for the most part)
what I wanted to do: baking, photographing, writing, avoiding housework, thrift
shopping, and spending countless hours in the library and bookstores. In four
more days that will all come to an end. When the kids come home for summer it’s
back to work for me.

But is that such a bad thing? Maybe a little more time with kids would enhance my creativity, not deplete it. Kids see, hear and taste things that we adults do not. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, when my kids and I spent all day together, they showed me how magical and delightfully simple childhood can be."

She goes on to tell about an essay she wrote when her children were younger and of how she recorded their conversation. She is such an amazing writer, I felt inspired to try and learn more about writing in a more interesting way. I also want to try to take better photographs, something I have always wanted to learn but never really felt I had the time. She concluded by saying,

"The essay ended there. I read it over twice, then typed it here. As I did so,
my summer plans came into view. What would happen if I climbed trees again?
What’s the harm in catching a grasshopper or two, just to see if they ever
blinked? What’s wrong with reading books? I do like Popsicles. And I think
Slurpee's are twice as much fun, what with how they can turn an ordinary
pink tongue into something garish and almost frightening. Also, playing in
the sandbox sounds infinitely more enjoyable than scrubbing the kitchen
floor. Could it be that giving myself over to summer with children would be
good for me, and maybe even good for my kids, too?"

Instantly, I began to think about when my kids burst through the door after their last day of school, I was ready. I wrote on the car with a paint marker, “Welcome to summer vacation,” it said. Then after I drove home, handed each kid a popsicle, and said “Let’s go have some fun.”