The Life Aquatic with Boo Zissou

I make no secret of the fact that summer is my favorite season of the year: long days, grilled food, iced tea, fresh lemonade, freeze pops watching fireworks, catching fireflies.

I am not really the sort of person who loves strenuous activity -- I'm a Taurus, after all, and we are better known for our love of sensuous things like basking in the sun with a good book and an icy cold beverage -- but even I can appreciate the well-earned kind of exhaustion that comes from a day spent playing cards, chasing the kids through the yard, getting sticky from eating juicy watermelon in the grass.

And, of course, the pool. We all already know that summer is Shae's favorite time of the year because she has pretty much unfettered access to an assortment of swimming pools.

Summer is our happy place. There is a specific set of smells that makes me unbelievably, almost intoxicatingly happy. I catch a whiff of it sometimes when I hold my niece these days. I smell it on Shae every day when she comes home from camp. It is a combination of things that signifies summer and instantly transports me to a time when I was a kid myself.

Chlorine and Coppertone. Add in some bug spray and nail polish remover, and it's like a drug for me. It's a high that's can't be matched by legal or illicit pharmaceuticals of any stripe. It just ...

... it's what summer IS.

Graduation / Recital Weekend

Shae graduated from kindergarten on June 14th. I've been trying to write about it since then, but I haven't really been able to, because this happened ...

... and it promptly (and repeatedly) made me lose my ever-loving shit.

"Tomorrow" is totally my jam, you guys. It is dorky and irrational and whatever, but this song has gotten me through SO MUCH in the last 39 years. I saw "Annie" on Broadway way back when I was somewhere around Shae's age, and it's stuck with me all that time. Formative years, and whatnot. "Tomorrow" is not just adorable when sung by a bunch of adorable little moppets -- it's practically anthemic.

No, seriously. I know my soul has become blackened and singed and poisoned with snark over the years (SPOILER ALERT: this is what happens to optimistic idealists who forcibly become cynical realists over time) but when stuff is bad, I mean REALLY bad, I still stick out my chin and grin and say, "The sun'll come out tomorrow." It doesn't make everything better, not right away, but it keeps me from self-medicating, a lot of the time.

Related: had I known that the class's performance was going to be SO MOVING (shut up I'm a sap we all know this already don't you judge me), then I would have left her hair in its natural state, because COME ON. Her curls are PERFECT for singing songs from "Annie."

They are not quite as perfect for fitting under a graduation cap, however. (I just realized I never posted any pictures from last year's preschool graduation, probably because we had that tragic, tragic haircut and then we left pretty much right away for Chicago, but here's a link for reference. We have about 33% fewer teeth this year, not that you can tell, but we're offsetting that by about 500% more hair, so I'd call that pretty much a wash.)

As if graduation wasn't enough of an emotional wringer, Shae's first official dance recital was they very next day. She's already been in a Christmas pageant of sorts, but this was the first Big One: costumes, lighting, tickets, flowers, etc. Her class danced to "I Feel Pretty," which was another emotional rollercoaster for me, because one of the greatest times of my life was being in West Side Story in college, so of course the entire thing was fraught with DRAMEMORIES!

Everybody came to see her -- mother-in-law, parents, my sister and niece and even my brother-in-law -- so my kid was pretty much over the moon about all of the attention. She's already talking about next year. We ordered official pictures and the performance DVD and whatnot, and I'll figure out how to include that stuff later without violating copyrights (no lie, I am SCARED of the lady who runs the dance school and I DO NOT want her to come after me), but here is a little behind-the-scenes footage in the meantime:

(By the way, ALL the girls in her class did that, for 45 MINUTES, while they were waiting to go on in the second half of the show. I got dizzy just watching them.)

Adventure Time

Shae has a bunch of stuff coming up this week that is probably a much bigger deal to me than it is to her: first flat-ironings, dance recitals, graduation, stuff like that. Milestones are kind of meaningless when you're six and your whole life is literally ahead of you. Of course, I'll be a total cracked-out mess, as usual, with all the pictures to prove it. In the meantime: a story.

= = = = =

We don't watch a lot of superhero shows in our house. We're not really opposed to them, in theory, but Shae is highly suggestible and we're just trying to be proactive about any potential behavioral changes that might result from exposure to stuff she's not ready for. Others probably call this a symptom of the "pussification" of our children; they're probably correct to a large degree. But at the same time, these Others don't have to live with a kid who thinks that all adopted children -- e.g., Superman, Hercules, the Power Puff Girls -- have either super powers or Daddy Warbuckses.

But like every kid ever born in America ever, my kid is at least aware of your major superheroes. Batman, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, etc. It might be a while before she understands why funny sideburns and yellow Spandex sometimes makes Mommy weak in the knees (by the old gods and the new, I hope this remains the case), but she knows who the X-Men are. And she already knows that when she grows up, she's going to be the superhero who saves everybody, "not just some silly boy who only saves the pretty girls with down hair."

So why is this blog post all pictures of my niece running around my uncle's back yard wearing a scarf around her neck, superhero-style?

Because more than once, when someone asked her who she was pretending to be, while she was doing this very thing ...

... my niece said, "Super-Shae!" And Shae would reply, "Makayla is my hero." And they were both right.

Sum-Sum-Summertime!

These pictures are from Memorial Day Weekend, which is of course not technically summer, but it is unofficially the beginning of the summer picnic-watermelon-outdoor-swimming-corn-on-the-cob-festivity season.

Go ahead, guess which of these hyphenates are most important to my kid?

It's been a weird spring so far -- nice, but cool at night. My uncle the Picnic Master opened his pool the first weekend in May, but temperatures went down into the 40's a lot of nights until about two weeks ago. Thankfully he has the hot tub, and once my kid got in there, there was no getting her out.

 

Except to go off the diving board. Mad props to her, too, because the water in the main pool was only about 64°F. But she passed her "big kid" swimming class, and now we'll let her go into the deep end without an adult present (although someone needs to be nearby to watch her). You'd think someone gave her a million dollars and a free puppy.