Fold My Laundry Please

Day One of our excessive heat warning has come and gone and we didn’t get voted off the island yet.  I have to admit that I haven’t watched not even one episode of Survivor ever, so I’ll stop with the show references before I embarrass myself!  But I digress…the point is that we hit 102 degrees today and didn’t melt into puddles of goo.  Now, before I start hearing you say things like, "Boohoo!  102 degrees!  What a wuss!", I’d like to point out that the upper eighties is the normal high temperature around here.  Because of this fact, most homes in the area…DO NOT HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING!  Our apartment…DOES NOT HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING! 

Places that do have air-conditioning include our car, which we went everywhere in today; the movie theater, where we took in this week’s free family movie this morning; Burger King, though with all their grills they were just barely on the comfortable side of cool; and the doctor’s office, where we spent a mere half hour before climbing back into our air-conditioned mini-van and heading back to our cave home.  I plopped myself down in front of my computer and read blogs before deciding that we would not make it till evening if we didn’t get into our swim suits right that very minute!  When Andrew got home from work, I thrust his suit at him and said, "Get changed.  We’re going swimming." 

We had a really pleasant time swimming.  The water was wonderfully cold and Aurora joined in with the boys for the first time in their constant display of beauty and form through the medium of cannonballs!  We had only one small casualty.  At one point, Gideon held his hand on his side and just calmly kept repeating, "Ow.  Ow.  Ow."  We lifted him a little ways out of the water and saw a nice sized scratch that I thought I had seen earlier.  I thought maybe the chlorine was bothering it.  Then Andrew lifted him out a little bit more and there was a tiny, funny looking slimy string attached to his stomach.  I sat him on the side of the pool and pulled on it.  It came off in my fingers easily enough and I could see that there was something still sticking out of his skin.  I used my fingernails and carefully removed a teeny, tiny, stinger from his belly.  Apparently, all of the splashing had annoyed a bee enough to sting him, though none of us actually saw it happen.  I’ve never been stung by a bee myself, so I don’t know if a bee normally leaves behind its entrails along with the stinger, but it really grossed me out once I realized what the slimy thing had been.  Since none of our children had ever been stung before, we kept a careful eye on him for a while to make sure he didn’t swell up or start having trouble breathing.  Everything was fine, however.  The spot puffed up a bit and seemed to itch him a little, but was flat again and blissfully ignored by the time we got out of the pool. 

The temperature is finally down to 79 right now, and though I don’t want to, I’ve got to close up the windows for the night.  Tomorrow will be day two of our excessive heat warning with a predicted high of 99 degrees, but we’ve got a date with Harry Potter as soon as Andrew gets home from work, so we just have to get through the day and we’ll be okay.  Your attempts to spoil the movie for me will all be in vain since I refuse to access the internet until after I’ve seen the movie for myself!

So there!

Pppttttthhhhbbbbtttt!