Dog days of summer

I had a funny thought yesterday. All my life I've heard ~ and then later in life found myself saying ~ stuff about the dog days of summer. I'm sure others have heard these sweltering, melty hot days referred to as the same. The funny part is that I've used the phrase without knowing for sure what it means. So with the modern miracle of technology (Wikipedia) easily available, I decided to check it out. In addition to mentioning that it "refers to the hottest, most sultry days of summer," it also said that "The term "Dog Days" was used by the Greeks (see, e.g., Aristotle's Physics, 199a2), as well as the ancient Romans (who called these days caniculares dies (days of the dogs)) after Sirius (the "Dog Star"), the brightest star in the heavens besides the sun." I suppose the even funnier part is that both of my children were born in the year of the dog. With that thought in mind I made a promise to embrace these hot, sticky days and celebrate them, this year and every year in the future!

Of course it is sometimes easier to embrace the Dog Days of summer in NC from the comfort of my air-conditioned home or car! We've been home from our road trip for nearly two weeks now and I can't say that we've done much exciting. It has been pretty much unscheduled time to allow Kylie (and if I'm going to be honest, Mommy and Daddy) some time to catch up on our missed rest from our trip. Many days we hang out in the house (or at preschool) to escape the brutal heat of the day and then emerge as the sun begins to fall behind the trees.

A few glimpses of what we've been up to...

Kylie announcing what she found in the skimmer basket at "Dahma's" pool.
She's saying, "no frogs, just bugs."

Helping pick up screws for the decking after the bag spilled on Saturday. We spent the day working in the heat to build a 31 foot wheel chair ramp helping out one of our CCC camps.

Playing with cars ~ she's recently taken a new interest in this garage and the other day as she was playing said, "I wanna pay wif Taeb!" Funny that she never showed much interest in these cars until she had a brother...

Playing with Daddy while supper was being prepared.

"I get my hair wet!"
We broke down and bought a $25 frog pool for Kylie to "swim" in on those afternoons when we just don't have the time to go over to Grandma's house. She loves getting her hair wet by laying on her back and gently lowering herself down with her elbows, but don't even think about getting her face wet! (In case you wonder, yes, this was an "al fresca" pool moment ~ guess she learned some bad habits of nude bathing at our reunion...)