Summer is Nearing the Finish Line

Hi friends.  I've been MIA lately, but that's because I've been off ENJOYING SUMMER!  I've been relishing the lazy mornings with my girls, family hikes, days at the beach, the pool, the park, the zoo.  You know...the usual.  I've been enjoying our mini-getaways to San Diego, islands off the coast of California  and to my mom's house where we spent 3 full days in a pool from morning to LATE at night.  That's the life, I tell you.  I have been LOVING SUMMER.

Family Hikes

Laurel's face is priceless

En route to Catalina

The rest of the Catalina party.  Happy birthday to Grammie!

Vacationing at the Hotel Del Coronado

There was lots of swimming

We were lucky enough to have a picnic on the beach with Paul and Leesie

Beautiful Leesie took the kids hunting for "sea bubbles" (aka -kelp). It is now a favorite family event each time we hit the beach

Aunt Ana braved the bridge to visit us and even bought the girls some delicious ice cream.

We got to dress up to enjoy a party on the sand

Ready for our night out on the beach 

Swimming with Grammie in the desert

When we weren't swimming we were hanging out with friends and family

Bathing suit cousins

I found time to FINALLY turn this closet into... 

...this organized crafting space.

We've spent time with my cousin and her family who just moved back from HI.

And we made sure there was plenty of time for some saggy diapers and high heels.

We have been enjoying summer so much that I even managed to spend enough time in the sun to have evidence in the form of faint tan lines, proving my skin CAN turn from "light" to "fairly light" despite using SPF 75.   If that isn't the sign of a successful summer, I don't know what is.

Just the other day, despite my love of all things summer, I found myself saying that I wished it were Fall.  I know that if you don't live in Southern California, you may believe that the only sign of Fall is that the days get shorter and that the fruit at our Farmers Market turns  from plums, peaches and nectarines, to apples, pears, and persimmons.  However, as a native Southern Californian I can tell you, Fall is a real season here.  It is a season we feel more than see, perhaps, but it's a season nonetheless.  It's a season that makes me want to burn lovely fall candles and hang a fall wreath on my door.  Fall brings the sounds of football back into my home which immediately makes me want to put a sweater on (and then open all the windows to cool down).  In Fall, I can't help but want to make soups and baked goods.  I love Fall.  It brings the excitement of a new school year, a new TV lineup, and an entire new line of clothes, shoes and home decor to browse through while visiting all my favorite stores.  It brings the promise of Thanksgiving, a holiday I love since I get to spend it with many of the very friends and family I am genuinely thankful for.

Then I realized, it's still summer!  Why am I so eager for Fall?  This got me thinking about life and growth and appreciating where we are today.

Disclaimer - I will now step onto my soap box:

I do this every season.  As one season comes to an end and another season gears up, I begin looking ahead and lose track of where I am.

This year, though, I'm more aware of just how quickly time is going.  I don't know if you received this memo, but my girls are growing and changing quickly, yet I feel like I treat their changes much the same as I do the seasons.  As the girls enter each new phase, I slowly begin understanding it, managing it, EMBRACING it.  Then, I see hints of the next phase, and get excited about the potential it shows, sometimes to the exclusion of appreciating where I'm at, or worse, where they're at.  The transition between these phases can be painfully slow, or tragically fast, but regardless of the speed, when it finally happens, I find myself mourning the phase we left behind.  So I ask myself, "why was I so stinking excited for that next chapter/phase/season to begin?"  The answer is always the same..."I don't know, but I'd be a lot less anxious for the time to pass if I could go back and have a do-over."  My only solace in all this is that despite what we think, or want to believe about ourselves, we are all guilty of looking ahead and forgetting where we're at; it's human nature to take time for granted.

I know that these phases and seasons are just chapters in my life's book.  I am painfully aware that I am currently acting out my favorite book ever, but I will never be able to so much as read it.  I don't know about you, but I can read a good book a million times and never get sick of it.  With each new reading, I will pick up on different nuances that I missed the first time around when I was too anxious moving on to the answers that the next sentence would reveal to really appreciate what was happening right then, in that sentence.  This isn't just any book.  This is MY book.  I can't let myself skip ahead to the next sentence in my own book.

This year, as summer nears the finish line and fall begins to peak around the corner, rather than anxiously awaiting the onset of the next season, I am going to enjoy every last second of this one.  I am going to enjoy all that summer offers, and I'll do it with my family.  I will never get to be back here.  Back where our babies are still, babies.  Where our lives are filled with innocent wonder and where the majority of our book together, is still unwritten. I don't know about you, but as I march into all the joys of Fall, I don't want to find myself wishing that I had added one more paragraph to this chapter before it came to an end.

P.S. - Clare starts pre-K in 2 days, which may help explain my obvious nostalgia.