Lazy?

It is a quiet summer morning in the neighborhood.  With the 4th behind us, summer is half over and I still haven't gotten into the rhythm of vacation days.  I can't quite decide if summer should be lazy or productive.  So I have a list of ToDos which I am slowly working on.  And there is another list of things in my head which I should be working on, but mostly I have been spending time with the kids (YAY! We were able to put the pool up this year!) piddling around the house, watching TV and reading.  It has been an unusually hot summer, topping 100 several times, which just really encourages lazy afternoons.  And my favorite TV shows are the summer ones...HGTV Design Star, Whodunnit?, Rizzoli and Isles, The Killing, Drop Dead Diva...such fun.

Our trip to see little Maxwell in Hawaii started the summer off right.  He is such a beautiful little guy.  Susie and Joe have dived into the parenthood pool head first, totally immersed in this tiny (although growing fast) character. I predict that as he grows and becomes more able to explore the world around him, his complaining will cease...

One would think that since Leah, Sam, Emma and Tela live here in the same town with us that we would see a lot of them...especially the two that attended the school where I teach!  But life during the school year is so busy and exhausting for these two grandparents, that it just doesn't happen that we see them much.  But now, we are all out of school and the time is there!  So we got to have Leah for a sleep over, all by herself! Well, she brought Hobbes, the kitten too.  And we all spent a fun 4th of July weekend together at Muna's and the beach.  And I even got to have the newest members of the clan, Nate's boys Caleb and Gabriel, and Alice spend the night...admittedly for a not-so-fun reason when Abby hemorrhaged  and had to be flown by helicopter down to Bakersfield, but still...

We made it through the hardest week of the year, the week that we remember both Aiden's birth and six years later, his death.  This year we bought a cement bench to put next to Aiden's tree at Stacie's house.  We will have a paint day sometime before school starts and let all the kids paint it together. Meagan told me that she feels Aiden pushing on her back when she is up by the tree.