Summer Days

I'm having a sensory memory right now.

I just came downstairs from putting the girls to bed, and the whole house smells like wildfire. It dropped me straight into the fires from two years ago -- I immediately had to go out in front and then out in back to see if there's a telltale glow in the hills or on the horizon anywhere. Nothing is visible, so I hope it's just a bunch of outdoor fireplaces. I REALLY don't want to pack up the house and evacuate again...

There are days I truly love being a mom. Today was one. I got up early to run/hike with a friend of mine, and it was absolutely gorgeous. But you could tell it was going to be a scorcher - at 8:00am down by the ocean it was totally clear, sunny, and HOT. So when I came home, I said to hell with the housework and took the girls to the playground with the waterpark sprinklers (since we don't have a pool, like I grew up with), and we ran around for the next few hours. When they got hungry, we came home for lunch, and I set up beds in their fort outside, and they both fell asleep there for several hours. It was a very peaceful day -- the kind of day you're supposed to have when you're a kid during the summer.

When I was little, my two best friends (next door and across the street) and I all had pools in our backyards. When you live in a place that hits 115 in the summer, a pool is a critical accessory. We would spend every day (and night) during the summer traipsing from one backyard to the next, swimming in the morning at Lori's, in the afternoon at Becky's and at night at my house, depending on how the fancy struck us (or how our parent's respective patience levels might be). By 10:00pm, we were exhausted little mole children, completely blind from the amount of chlorine our eyes had endured. The three of us would crash at someone's house, and get up in the morning to do it all again. We didn't have "play dates" -- we were more like a pack of puppies.

I miss that.