Bye, bye, summer

Good bye, summer and all of your wonderfully hot days. I'll miss your 8:30 sunsets, going barefoot anytime I want and long, lazy mornings. I wish you could stay forever so I would never have cold hands and feet (okay, I still have cold hands and feet) but you know what I mean.

Hello Fall, you're okay, very pretty I must admit, but I'm not very happy to see you. You mean winter is coming, you mean the days are getting shorter, you let me know with your 50 degree mornings that I'm going to be freezing in very short order and I'm not too happy about that.

I suppose I should move to the equator.

Summer favorite

getting away
finding a little piece of heaven
sitting and dreaming
digging, playing, watching it all
spending time
together
nothing better

Going away

It's hard sometimes to take a good look at your life when you're right in the middle of it, and the best thing to do, maybe the only thing, is to take a big break. A stay at home break or a vacation sort of break, either will do and we were fortunate enough to have had the latter this past week.

At the risk of showing the neverending vacation slide show or telling story after story about what happened this past week, I'll just try to hit the high points and not drag you through every detail.

For the first time on a vacation since having kids I feel like I actually found time to relax. Deep, long, winding down to the bone relaxation, the kind I really needed. I read a few books, put down the knitting, took pictures, played, watched tv, and even dozed a bit on the beach once or twice. Bliss.

The kids had non-stop board games going of one kind or another all week. My favorite is to watch Lauren and John play chess and listen to how they bargain with one another.

"Okay, well, if you take my pawn then I can get your castle, do you want to do that?"

"Yeah!"

Don't ask. Somehow they get along much better than a brother and sister should.


Legos were still everywhere.

The kids had a ball finding hermit crabs in the Bay, that was a first for all of us. John made them a little corral one day.

Then there was the relentless search for blue crabs. Their only motive is to catch them and release them back into the water, not eat them. That may change over the years, but for now they don't understand the whole appeal of the blue crab, they just know they're tricky and fun to catch. I could pick crabs all day if I had enough. Hmmm. This might be a good system, they catch, I eat.

Fishing was all around us.

Nearly consuming some of us.

And astonishing the rest of us. Below you can see John reeling in his five-foot shark. Yes. Shark. Chills.

We ate plenty of seafood. Just not the sharks.



On our last day, a hike through the woods to an unadvertised part of the beach,

yielded a jar full of sea glass, and an impromtu scavenger hunt. I love those. And I love sea glass especially when I find it myself.

But perhaps what will stand out most in my mind was the calm, the slowing down, the change of pace and the chance to reprioritize, to plan for the future, and soak up the present. Now if I can just carry on the vacation mentality we'll be getting somewhere.

In the thick of it

I've been slacking on the blog this weekend, feeling completely engulfed by summer but not regretting a single second of it. We headed to the beach on Friday to visit family and the novelty of the treat of being able to go to the ocean just for the day still has not worn off on this former Missouri girl even after 17 years. Even though the trip was short I was still able by the afternoon to go to an almost hypnotized state, letting my mind get completely lost in the waves and the sound of the ocean. I had decided not to worry myself over the lack of knitting work being accomplished for the market and wondered what would happen if I just let it all go and participate in what was happening right in front of me. Let's just say I'm happy with the results and I know that's a directive I need to follow often.

It sounds so cliche to talk about what fun ages the kids are now, and how great it is to be able to just pick up and go and see and do things and experience it all through their eyes, but I'll go ahead and say it anyway. And while they probably wish I would do more with them, ride every wave, get caked with sand and salt, body surf and boogie board, what they don't probably realize is just how much I'm taking in and what great enjoyment I find in observing and listening and watching every smile and eager look on their faces.

So there was plenty of play and some extremely worn out kids and reality hitting hard when we returned. We came home to a very sick husband/father Friday night and he's stayed that way through all of Father's Day, I sweated out the market in 100 degree temperatures, extreme humidity and a mediocre turnout, and my car has let me know in no uncertain terms that the beach trip was just about all it's aging transmission could handle and that I'd better trade it in for something with more life in it before it stops running altogether.

Even with bright prospects ahead, these unexpected blips in the radar cast a negative tone over everything, reminding me that the future remains uncertain. There are some big changes in our near future and I'm left feeling anxious and scared, hoping that all will turn out well in the end. I'm sure everything will, it's just the anticipation that I can do without sometimes.

I felt better after Kevin and I talked through it all, desite his throbbing head, congestion and running eyes, and we both ended up feeling a little bit brighter, deciding once again not to operate and make decisions based solely on fear. It would be better perhaps to meet life head on and just roll with it rather than letting it roll right over top of us, we decided, giving each other an unintentioned pep talk. It's a shame we had to have such heaviness on Father's Day and so we've also decided that we haven't yet had ours. We've gone ahead and postponed the holiday until next week when hopefully we all are feeling much, much better.

I feel the same way

I'm sharing this picture for two simple reasons. First, I'm tired of the rain that we've had for the past 3 solid days and the 30-40 degree temperatures that went along with it, so my mood looks something like Allie's above, perhaps without her flair for the dramatic. Second, because I'm so tired of the weather I'm gearing myself up for the warmer days by dipping back into the photos from last summer.

It never hurts to daydream.