Normally, summer is my least favorite season. I hate hot weather, and I live in an area that’s extremely humid, so I spend three months in a perpetual brain-melting sweat. Not fun. Add to that the fact that I live in major mosquito territory, I despise most amusement parks, I hate wearing shorts and most sunblocks make my skin sting, and you’ve got a recipe for misery that lasts from June until September.
However, I have kids, and my kids love summer, so rather than be a party pooper during their extremely long vacation, I’ve been working on finding things about summer I enjoy so I can share the season with them. For starters, I got a popsicle mold so we could enjoy home made popsicles on the back deck. That’s a lazy summer activity I can get into, especially when I can make popsicles out of pomegranite juice, or blueberry juice…
It’s been ages since I’ve had a water pistol, so when I found a bunch for sale at a store, I picked up a few. The girls have never had a water pistol, so I figured we were overdue. We broke three water pistols that afternoon (which leads me to ask, what does it take to get a decent water pistol these days?!), but we had several more (we bought a bulk pack, thankfully), and the girls and I spent an hour or so that afternoon chasing each other around the backyard and spraying each other until everyone was soaking wet.
Speaking of wet, we’ve got a pool in the neighborhood, so we went there on Friday, but not before making another trip to the store to pick up new pool floaties. I’ve never had my own pool floatie, so I finally decided I had to get one. Why on earth have I denied myself a pool floatie for so many years?! I got a big floating papasan chair for myself, a snorkel set for the Princess, and a big floating horse boat thing for Pixie. Princess is old enough and a good enough swimmer that I don’t have to worry too much that she’ll drown. And Pixie is calm enough this year that she’ll sit in her floatie for all of five minutes before starting to squirm and demand to get out, get in, use her sister’s snorkel, sit in my floatie, use someone stranger’s pool toys, etc. So I managed to get five minutes of just floating in the pool, in the shallow end, with the lead line for her floatie in hand before Pixie tried to drown herself the first time.
But probably best of all, we’ll all be doing the one activity I’ve always enjoyed doing in summer, and that’s reading. I picked a book for our evening reading this summer, “The First Summer Year” by Ian Kellam. I read this book when I was a child, and I’m glad I get to enjoy it all over again. I’m thinking that once I finish reading “Oryx and Crake,” I’ll pick up “Watership Down.” And once I finish reading “The First Summer Year” to the girls, I’m thinking of reading them Lloyd Alexander’s “The Book of Three.” Yep, summer reading; whether lazing in a lawn chair in the morning or on the couch in the afternoon or curled up in bed in the evening, it’s one of the best things about the season.
Hope everyone else has fun this summer!
