“after all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”

When it's fall, fall is my favorite season. When it's "winter," "winter" is my favorite (it gets quotation marks because... well... Texas) but, man oh man, when summer comes...

 

There's just something about summer. I think it's because I live in a southern state on the coast that just makes it so darn easy to celebrate summer. I love the fall, but its hard to do fall-like things everyday when you're still wearing short sleeves and sweating buckets. In fact, just read that sentence again and substitute the word "winter" in for fall. Spring is fun... but mainly as a precursor to the jubilant summer. In fact, right now it technically still is spring... but we're calling it summer. We start the summer season early and stretch it out for as long as possible because we've got a lot of hot and sweaty months to spend along the waterfronts down here.

As mentioned and mentioned and mentioned, we kicked off summer '15 with one of my favorite vacations ever. We came back home and immediately went into my "rule" of doing something fun and summer-y every single day. So, we got a new kid pool (last year's cracked) and put up a clothes line for hanging wet clothes and towels. Carolena really wants to start hanging all of our clothes on it from the washing machine. I could totally dig that if it weren't going to be more work for me... but I mean... I'm barely keeping Mount Everest at bay here. Perhaps I'll throw the sheets out there sometimes. That does sound wonderful.

The pool has been thoroughly inaugurated through both a party with Carolena's school friends (a smashing success except for the moment when I realized there were sugar ants in the cupcakes. Did I mention the friends with "cake ladies" were there?) and a family impromptu water fight last night. Taco dinner is postponed to tonight and peanut butter sandwiches were consumed yesterday as we spent all of dinner time waging a water war in our backyard.

I told Chris and Carolena that I want our house to stay clean all summer so that any time we ever want to invite friends over we can. So far so good. The goal is to have people over on a whim any time we feel like it. I see that Tuesday is Donald Duck's birthday and Thursday is Kamehameha Day (luau anyone?) and Sunday is National Bourbon Day and Strawberry Shortcake Day so it looks like we have a lot to celebrate just this week alone.

I plan for us to spend the summer with iced teas and mint juleps and lemonade and popsicles and cookouts and the bubble machine and good books and good friends and our back deck and the splash pad and the ymca and the beach and well... you get the picture. Join me if you're interested.

“This day was the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.” The Wind in the Willows