Home again. Again.

We extended our weekend away and only arrived home a few hours ago. I have a ton of accumulated outings for the blog, but no energy to go into them tonight. Luckily we have a couple of weeks of absolutely no travel, so hopefully I’ll be able to catch my breath and catch up with everything else soon.

Meanwhile, I recently wrote an article on area alternatives to your “home base” pool for Kids Out and About. I’ve been helping with the Kids Out and About weekly newsletter, too, so if you haven’t signed up for it, you should.   There’s a yellow box in the lower left where you can sign up.

We arrived home and noticed that it’s freakin’ hot in our house. We only have two window AC units, both downstairs. We manage okay with fans upstairs, except that it’s usually still a little too warm for the girls at bedtime. With M’s foot issue and the hot weather last week, I established what turned out to be a dangerous precedent. Usually I tell the girls to hop in the shower if it’s extra hot, but when the shower wasn’t an option, I ad-libbed. I let each girl lie down on the kitchen counter with her head hanging into the sink, then sprayed each head with the faucet sprayer, beauty-parlor-style, for a quick cool-down. I didn’t think much of it (obviously), but they thought it was the Most Fabulous Activity Ever. Apparently, it tickles.

So now I think they might want to do it every evening for the rest of the summer. It means that I have to actually finish all of my after-dinner clean-up, but their shrieks and giggles are absolutely worth it. In fact, now they like to do each other, but I still have to stand guard to cut them off before things deteriorate into a full-on water fight.  Also to keep their flailing bodies from crashing off the counter.  But they get so much joy out of it, and it only takes a couple of minutes. Also, it’s cheaper than more window units.