The first month of summer vacation is behind us.  It seems to have gone by too quickly but looking back, we’ve done a lot and had a good four weeks, or so.  The baseball season ended.  Then, my wife had the first two weeks of July off of work.  So, this past week has been when the real summer started.  Real summer being me at home with the girls all day, most days.  Last summer wasn’t great.  It might have been good.  But, should probably be best described as, OK.  There were a lot of bad days.  Judging by this past week, I think the rest of the summer will also be OK. 

There have been forest fires in Canada for the past month, or so.  The smoke clouds our skies and sometimes our grounds.  Because of the air pollution caused by the fires, we had our last baseball game canceled.   We were not able to make up the game, so later in that week we had one last get-together for the kids who wanted to come out to the baseball field. 

The other guy who was coaching with me brought about 100 water balloons and threw them up for the kids to try to catch, and each kid got to swing the bat at a few balloon pitches.  Dee Dee was upset that she didn’t get to catch any of the balloons and only hit one pitch.  But, she cheered up when the snacks were brought out.  The kids all sat together and ate chips and popsicles.  I took some pictures of the kids who were there, which was about half of the team.  Dee Dee’s first team.  I had assumed that Dee Dee would like being a member of a team, and she did.  It was a bit of work to be the coach, but it was worth it. 

I think that you can tell the difference between people who did and didn’t play team sports while they were growing up.  Learning early in life to work together with people who you like, don’t like, are friends with, don’t really know, etc. is good.  It’s easier to learn when you are young and doing something fun than it is when you grow up, and it’s not fun, like at work.  I don’t go around asking, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve worked with a lot of people who never played team sports. 

We had a rather uneventful 4^th of July.  After a long period of drought, it rained on the morning of Independence Day.  But, it was clear enough in the evening to bring the girls outside to blow off some fireworks after it got dark.  No one was injured, but the sole of my shoe came unglued from the front half of my left shoe, causing me to spend the evening flopping around like I was wearing one swimming flipper.  We had some small fireworks, but there was no shortage of explosions and lights in the sky. 

After about 18 days off work, my wife got back to her routine this past Tuesday.  Assuming that the change might send the girls into shock, I brought them to a huge playground Tuesday morning.  I thought that being a few weeks into the summer, on a Tuesday, and earlyish in the day we would have the place to ourselves.  I couldn’t have been more wrong! 

There were three distinct groups of kids from different day camps distinguished by red, yellow, and orange t-shirts.  The red army had the most soldiers.  At one point, they gathered them all together in squads of ten so they could do a head count.  There were seven squads!  When the orange army sat down to eat lunch at the picnic tables, there were six tables with six kids at each.  The yellow army never came together as one group while we were there.  Nobody knew how many of them there were.  Smart! 

Audio stuck close to me while Dee Dee made a friend to run around with and then lose track of.  And, I often lost track of Dee Dee.  At eight years old, she should be fine on her own.  But, with all the armies running about, I couldn’t help but feel protective.  Dee Dee had, uncharacteristically, worn all black to the playground.  So, it was easy to find her among all the brightly colored armies and civilians.   

I ended our tour of the playground when a child started screaming and shrieking from the top of one of the enclosed towers.  This brought out the red general, an older woman that had allowed Audio to cut in line in front of her soldiers earlier in the day.  She stood on the ground below where the screams were coming from and spoke into a handheld, walkie-talkie microphone that was clipped to her shoulder.  She sent some Second Lieutenants up into the tower to bring the boy down.  A crowd had gathered around the tower and the shrieking was getting louder and more frantic.  I thought I heard the word, “elbow.”  But, when I asked Dee Dee if she knew what was going on, she said that she thought that the kid had an accident.  Either way, I told the girls that it was a good time to leave. 

I didn’t take the girls out of the house on Wednesday.  We stayed inside and dumped glue on the dining room table.  Dee Dee started working on a collage and Audio worked on a paper chain for her birthday.  Audio didn’t go the traditional route.  What she came up with resembled a frying pan, more than a chain.  Most of the links had two paper hoops attached to them.  She had only just learned how to glue the paper together to make a loop.  So, she was focusing more on proficiency than placement. 

On Wednesday evening we took the girls to a local park to listen to a free concert.  It went a little worse than I’d hoped it would.  Neither of the girls were interested in listening to the music, but both of them wanted to run around.  It didn’t help that there seemed to be dozens of other children running around.  What the girls couldn’t see was that there was a parent behind each running kid, eventually grabbing them and bringing them back to where they belonged.  There were just so many kids, that unless you focused on one at a time, it looked like fish coming to the top of a tank for feeding.  It was difficult to keep track of which fish were waiting for food, which were fighting for food, and hard to notice that some were down, hiding inside a ceramic shipwreck or skull eating their food.  We arrived late and left early. 

Thursday went a little better.  I brought the girls to a watch repair shop to buy batteries for watches that died during the pandemic.  When I checked the address of the shop I go to for battery replacement, Google told me that it had been four years since I’d been there.  Both of my wife’s watches and my watch, appeared to have died on the same day, the sixth of some month.  Dee Dee’s little watch doesn’t display the date. 

We really only needed a battery for Dee Dee’s watch.  My wife and I never have an opportunity to wear our nice watches.  But, I ordered a watch for Audio for her birthday.  In the process of verifying that it was the same size as the one we gave Dee Dee a while back, I saw that Dee Dee’s watch was dead.  I could imagine the trouble it would cause when Dee Dee, feeling jealous of Audio’s new watch found that hers not only was without butterflies, but without power.  Surprisingly, the owner of the repair shop allowed both girls to pick out a free watch from a selection of children’s watches.  It might make the watch that I bought for Audio a little less special, but it made both of the girls very happy.  And, when I asked Audio if having a watch made her want to learn to tell time, she said, “No.  I just like the watch.”  So, maybe the birthday present watch will become a Christmas present watch. 

We stopped at a liquor store.  In the parking lot, Dee Dee received a compliment on the tie-died shirt she made over the weekend.  Audio wasn’t out of the car in time to receive a compliment on her creation, but she did have fun showing off her new watch to the cashier.  When asked what time it was, Audio declared that it was 7 o’clock.  She didn’t specify 7:00 AM or 7:00 PM, but everyone listening to her knew it was neither.  And, even though I told the girls a few times that this particular liquor store doesn’t give lollipops to kids, they were still disappointed when they weren’t offered any candy. 

Then we picked up some tacos in a place where you have to know, at least, numbers in Spanish to get your order.  Our number was 55, so we managed all right.  But, I was a little unhappy with Dee Dee.  She has become interested in money.  She’s interested in having it, but more interested in giving it away.  I’ve spoken to her multiple times about how her money is for her and no one else needs her money.  We don’t want her using her money for skill cranes, gumballs, or wishes from fountains.  And, if she needs anything, we’ll buy it for her.  Yet, she still feels the need to do something with her hard-found money. 

While I was giving our order at the counter, Dee Dee kept producing coins from her pocket and tossing them, forcefully, into the wooden tip box on the counter.  With each loud crack, the man taking our order stopped talking with me and thanked Dee Dee.  Ordering took much longer and made me much more annoyed than it needed to.  In my frustration over Dee Dee’s philanthropy, I forgot to order hot salsa, resulting in the employment of a translator, later.  But the tacos were excellent!