Day 1,763 - Summer Days Go By

It feels as if I’ve been more than a little busy this summer. For example, just since Ellie went on summer vacation, we’ve been to Worlds of Fun three times, Oceans of Fun twice, the Zoo twice, countless park trips, a few library trips, a trip to Savannah to see my mom and dad, a trip to Nebraska, and we’ve even gotten lost in the woods. All of these have been super fun but sometimes it’s good to just slow down and take a breather. Over the past couple of days, that’s been the plan.

Wednesday was one of the first days of the summer where it felt like we actually took a break and decided to not run ourselves ragged. Instead, we just peacefully chilled out at home and watched the movie, “Leo”. For the record, Ellie and Ethan were initially cautious at the idea of watching a new movie. They generally prefer to watch something that they have seen before but I was eventually able to convince them to give something new a try. Lo and behold, they ended up loving it and already want to watch it again!

Of course, no day can pass without work to be done. On Wednesday, that looked like doing three loads of laundry and heading to Aldi to do some long-delayed grocery shopping. I will say this about grocery shopping with both kids. It didn’t take me long to miss those times during the school year where I was shopping by myself. That was especially true when both kids decided to hang on the side of the cart as I made my way through the store. After all, a heavily loaded cart is hard enough to push without an extra hundred pounds weighing it down.

Today was a little bit fuller than yesterday but it was still fairly relaxing. We started our morning off with an impromptu trip to Hodge Park for some morning park time. The beautiful thing about hitting up a park around 8:00 am is that it’s a near guarantee that you will have the place to yourself. That was exactly the case in this instance. While I generally enjoy being around people, it is a special experience to just be able to soak up playing at the park without the stimulus of other kids running around. It also provided me with a nice little workout as Ellie and Ethan took turns being slung down the zipline by me.

After our park trip, we headed to the Liberty branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library where the kids picked out some new library books to check out as well as picking out their reward for the first 20 days of the Summer Reading Program. As Ellie gets older, it’s always fun to watch her painstakingly deciding what book to choose for her reward. She always takes time to read the backs as well as looking for awarded medals on the front.

This afternoon, we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and our friend, Cochran, by heading to his neighborhood pool for a couple of hours of swimming. As Ellie’s gotten older, it’s become really fun to work with her on her swimming technique. On this occasion, I took her down to the 5-foot-deep part of the pool and let her practice with. Of course, I was alongside her, taking care to do two things: Number 1: ensure that she did not drown and Number 2: provide instruction as needed.

Soon enough though, our fun ended, and it was time to head home and grill some tasty brats for dinner followed bed soon thereafter. I guess the moral of the story is that even though we had a couple of days without a big adventure planned, we still had plenty of things to do to provide entertainment and keep us busy.

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Day 1,755 - Boards, Saws, and Snakes

Summer’s here! However, I still feel like we’re not fully celebrating it yet. For one thing, all last week, Ellie spent her mornings taking part in a VBS while Ethan would spend his days at Fox Hill Elementary practicing what kindergarten will be like in the fall.

As for this week though, I had been looking forward to it quite a bit. You see, Ethan still is at Fox Hill each day. However, Ellie’s at home with me. Over the past week, I had been planning out fun things for us to do together. Among them were a trip to Savannah, an afternoon at Oceans of Fun, some tennis, and likely a trip to the library. However, when Ethan woke up this morning running a high fever which meant he couldn’t go to school. Instead of Ellie and I having some kind of adventure, we instead found ourselves just hanging out at the house all day. That being said, there’s still fun to be had if one keeps their eyes open.

For this day, I had one big goal to complete which Ethan being sick didn’t change. You see, since I worked on our deck last year, I’ve had a ton of old boards laying around from the project that needed to be gotten rid of. Therefore, I decided to take the first step toward making that a reality by sawing up some of the longer ones so that they could actually fit in my car.

While Ethan slept this morning, I headed outside to the backyard with Ellie in tow to begin my project. I started by picking up a longer board and carrying it down my patio stairs and towards the front yard. While I expected Ellie to just kill time by playing on her swing, she instead picked up a smaller board and followed me around front. In fact, with every trip I made to the front yard, she was right there behind me carrying one or two boards of her own.

Eventually, we had all the boards around front, and I began setting up my workstation so that I could safely cut the boards down. Finally, it was time to saw. Before I started, I gave Ellie strict instructions on how to keep both herself and me safe while I cut. Lucky for me, she’s great at following directions so there were no problems. On a couple of occasions, I actually had her hold the board so that I could cut safely. Don’t worry; she was quite a way off from where I was cutting.

One of my favorite things about our project was seeing how excited Ellie gets about the smallest things. As I made my way through our pile of lumber, I looked over at one point to see Ellie excitedly watching the ground. I set down my saw and made my way over to Ellie to see what she was looking at. As it turned out, she had found a garter snake and was watching it crawl about our driveway. It eventually disappeared into the grass but that didn’t stop Ellie from finding one of its snakeskins amongst the boards. I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to many people that she decided to keep that skin for her collection of interesting things that she finds in nature.

While our day obviously didn’t go according to plan, it’s still special to know that Ellie and I can make memories and have fun just doing everyday life together in the front driveway. Honestly, those small moments are probably some of the longest lasting memories that we’ll have together, too.

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