Summer

Summer is here! We had three days of hard rain, thunderstorms and everything, and we went from it trying to be summer to yeah, this is definitely summer!

Apropos of nothing, Summer always brings an old, old song to my head. I learned it in my Early British Lit class; my professor actually had a tune for it, so it gets stuck in my head really easy.

Sumer is i-cumin in
a 14th century English round


Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Sumer is i-cumin in,
Lhude sing, cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing, cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lamb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing, cuccu!


Cuccu, cuccu,
Wel singes thu, cuccu.
Ne swik thu naver nu!

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.

Anyway...

It's just too nice out to stay inside. It's in the low 70's with just enough breeze to keep the bugs off. Hubby wanted to wash the cars, and since you can't turn a hose on without Kiddo getting involved (he's gonna be a hydrologist when he grows up, I swear!), we decided to go to Grandpa's house, which is in a quiet subdivision with less traffic than the almost-a-main drag road we live on.

Far be it from me not to make a production out of it, I packed a big ol' picnic lunch. fried chicken (packed warm out of the oven), home made pasta salad, strawberries (on sale now and absolutely at the peak of flavor), and home made Chex Mix in case we got peckish. Plus juice, water, and a couple of huge 99 cent fountain drinks for the grownups.

Kiddo, of course, was traumatized that he couldn't play with the hose before lunch, but he tolerated waiting pretty well. Then he helped Hubby wash my car while Baby played with a big plastic dump truck full of cold water. Once Hubby was in the "don't spray the hose while I'm drying the car" phase, Kiddo came into the yard and gave our garden a good drink (you may recall that Grandpa has let us take over his garden plot, I'll blog on that soon). He found a long-handled brush that was out for car washing and dunked it in a bucket and wrote letters on the desk with it.

Grandpa came home and helped us polish off the chicken, then helped construction efforts in the sandbox he put in for the boys. The sandbox was a brilliant idea; it's sitting in the shade under the trees where it never really gets too hot and they can spend hours in it. Baby only ate a couple handfuls of sand...

Baby curled up for a nap on the rug on the porch just as Grandpa went in to watch the Cubs game and Hubby finished up his car, so Daddy and Kiddo had a nice game of t-ball, or some mutant thereof involving the bat, a playground ball, the slide and the hose. Then of course, another session in the sand box.

Baby woke up, stood up, looked around, walked to the table where the bag of Chex Mix was and pointed and said "THAT", clear as a bell. So we all had Chex Mix. Kiddo saw me give baby a bowl and when I was turned away got his own blow and served himself very nicely, which is not something we usually let him do at home, so it was a pleasant surprise. Then we headed home.

Sometimes it seems we don't get enough quality time together as a family, or when we do it's interrupted by a crisis, time-crunch, or temper tantrum. But today was almost idyllic. I know my earliest childhood memories are from when I was about Kiddo's age. I really hope days like this stick in his head when he's older as the good times.