Today, we drove to DC and did a tourist thing. We went to the top of the Washington Monument. It’s impressive. It’s worth getting the tickets in advance (you can’t go otherwise), and the kids loved it. There was a pure DC moment when roughly one hundred cyclists/skateboarders/hoverboarders and one wheelers surrounded the monument and prevented passage in or out for a few minutes, hoisting various flags in obvious protest but without any clear indication as to what the protest was. The non-denominational or discernable nature of the protest that seemed well organized and well attended, impressed and amused.
It’s hard to take anything serious when the people riding are on one wheelers or dressed as Pikachu. (There was one guy with a huge flag which I could never quite determine, and dressed as a Pokemon, I kid you not). Having googled today in DC, there wasn’t an indication of why, so it may have just been a bunch of people on alternative methods of transportation that swarmed the monument for fun, some carrying flags.
Summer crickets are letting us know, it will end soon. The emails from school are coming. We’ve bought backpacks and clothes and things like notecards and book covers.
Reluctantly, I looked through my summer list. We played. I didn’t lose 15 pounds but I did lose two.
I got a kid a learner’s permit, and three found summer jobs.
We made it to Ocean City, I made it to Texas, and we swam in the ocean at North Carolina.
I saw a musical and a concert. I made soft shell crab.
We went to two museums, several movies and a few farms. We cleaned out our closet (Marie Kondo style) and I made it out to lunch with two different friends. Going to try for a third. We read books. I read books and we had a massive water balloon fight with my children …and everyone won. We still have a concert to go to (Elton John), and a week left of the outdoor pool that we intend to indulge and this ice cream won’t eat itself. The drums also need a good beat down tomorrow, as a reminder to me, that fun must be as deliberate as work.
It’s a grave temptation, to weigh out you days in terms of what you get done, rather than whether you saw a beautiful sunrise, played a game of uno with your kids or sat out at a camp fire and stared at the stars while listening to your son play the same song he’s practiced all summer. The better portion always involves presence, rather than to do lists.
There are still two weeks of summer left. Yes, all that stuff like physicals and haircuts need to happen, but remember to get to the fun stuff first.
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