Lovelihood

High summer heat isn't my ideal weather by a longshot. Just another reason why Houston didn't agree with me. But on what was probably the hottest day of the year so far (did it actually rise up above 80° today?) I felt compelled to take us out into the day. The Boy nixed a trip to the wading pool in favor of spending the better part of the day at the zoo. I let myself off the hook and had the kids hold each others' sweaty, sticky little hands.

I cranked on my standard playlist of hipster tunes and the Lego rattling in the next room, and pushed aside quilt detritus to get some more Kindergarten preparation out of the way. New snack baggies had been on the list for a while, the last set shredded and, quite frankly, kind of disgusting from a couple years of use. Ditched the velcro (which proved a weak point in the construction of those other bags), went with a sweet Echino linen lined with muslin, and just went at the raw edges with a down and dirty zig zag stitch, a construction much like sandwich baggies before the advent of ziploc. No messing with right sides and wrong sides and turning and topstitching and french seaming. Cut, fold, sew. Eight baggies, two feet of fabric, a freshly-wound bobbin, one hour. Tested the result with a handful of pretzels. Works just fine.

As a young couple, we never had that accumulation of scavenged furniture and and ends from our parents' homes you find in every post collegiate home. Instead, we inaugurated our cohabitation with one frenzied trip to Ikea where, in a single loading of a rental truck, we furnished the first few years of our lives together. Most of that stuff years ago fell out of favor, were replaced with more reliable things or are gathering dust and spiders in the basement. But the dishes we've used every day. We finally replaced the set we'd been using for the past dozen years, our family's cereal-eating needs having long since outgrown the surviving number of bowls. The new set, also from Ikea, is sweet and simple, plain-white, unfussy, inexpensive. But, being all white and, of course, brand new, they seem a luxury all the same, like the first set of dishes we've purchased as adults.

During the cooler months, and there were many this year, I often got by with opaque woolen tights to go with my chosen uniform of t-shirt/skirt/boots. Summer changes little about my wardrobe except that my choice of hosiery now reveals a sliver of knee-skin.

Bear is at that age that is, yes, quite terrible at times. A lot of the time. Most of the time, really. But not so terrible that we can't just sit back and laugh at the absurdity that is living with a two-year-old.

Just a quick shot of the monorail on one of many seasonably warm days in Seattle.

It's been a week of running around in the sun, with trips to schools and aquariums and parks and appointments and, of course, work. So we haven't spent any time in our own backyard the past few days. Which is why this little guy, with his questionable web building skills, was afforded the time to splay out his construction on one of our deck chairs and reap its rewards for the better part of a week.