Sing a song of summer!

Summer is here, at long last. After such a long, wet spring, I feel like it's gotten hot rather quickly (and of course by "hot" I mean anywhere with five degrees of 80, which can start to feel a bit warm in a house with no air conditioning. It can! Don't judge me.).

We've made the transition quickly, I think, and have spent many recent days exhausting ourselves and our children with fun warm weather activities. I've even been riding my birthday bike (thanks, Jeremy!) to and from work!

We started our adventures a few weeks ago with a random, impromptu trip to Moscow, ID and Pullman, WA. You probably know we are "university tourists," so we ended up at both the University of Idaho and Washington State University. Both are quite nice campuses, although I will admit to being more enamored with WSU. I can't help it. It's very, very nice. Jonathan and Clara liked UofI better, probably because we bought them each a push pop. (A side note: you'll notice we only brought our single stroller--very short-sighted--but it turned out all right; we just started calling them Lewis and Clark.)



Downtown Moscow was really fun. We were there during a downtown art festival with live music and chalk drawing. There's also a fun playground right in the middle of downtown. The kids loved it, as you might imagine, although it was hard to tell that amidst the incessant wailing that accompanied us on our 90 minute drive home.



Two weeks ago we hiked Tubb's Hill, which is a lovely mountain in downtown Coeur d'Alene. Jonathan was a sport in the hiking backpack, and Clara was an even bigger sport by hiking almost the entire length of the two-mile hike. The biggest sport of all? It's got to be a toss-up between me and Jeremy, since Jeremy toted Jonathan the whole way and I carried a heavy, squirmy, crazy-haired Clara for the last 1/4 mile. Downhill. Jeremy and I brought along some interpretive trail literature (don't mock) so we could identify the trees and shrubs and the "fool's gold" minerals in the rocks (it's mica!). Clara enjoyed sitting down on the trail near each numbered sign and listening, although after about 5 mini-lessons she said, "Mom, let's just sit down without the paper this time." I was about to write that she has no zest for knowledge, but that's clearly not the case. In fact, she remembers more about the trail than I do, since she was annoyed with me just today when I told her a stick without leaves was called a stick and she said it was called a "snag." For the record, we're both right, since technically a snag is a full dead tree, not just a stick. Word.




And to fill up the rest of our time, we've enjoyed the beach, playing outside, going to storytime, and eating free lunch at the elementary school. I do have to give a lot of credit to Jeremy for making the summer special for the kids. I teach Monday through Thursday from 8:00 to noon, and Jeremy has filled up the mornings will all manner of awesome fun. His drive and organization have not disappeared since he graduated, and their "fun" is carefully scripted each day, but Jonathan and Clara don't know that. All they know is that they get to have great outings to the park, to the free summer movies, to the beach, and to school lunch. Fantastic.