school's out for summer!

so today is francis' last day of school. two months of summertime fun, just waiting to be started, as soon as it is sunny and warm. better have some "plan B" back-up ideas for the abundant gray and chilly, as is today.
raising a city kid in the summer is a bit tough; it forces one to be organized, (which i'm not) and it forces you to leave the house everyday. granted, when i was younger, (in highschool actually but all my siblings went younger all the way down to 2) even tho we had a big yard and a pool, we had a membership to the community pool and would go there virtually EVERY DAY. it was community for my mom to be with other moms, and it was community for the kids...no one was left out. my dad would often go straight to the pool after work, and meet us there for a picnic dinner and a refreshing dip.
i think i could easily be a pool-membership summer mom. however: have you noticed how many people in seattle have swimming pools? EXACTLY. it never gets truly hot enough here to warrant a personal pool, and the 4, count them, FOUR city pools are swamped with swim lessons, and the "public" swim time is only an hour and a half mid-morning, then you must exit, and pay again for the hour and a half mid-afternoon segment. (sigh.)which is why we frequent Green Lake any day there's sun: it's free, there's people, there's sand, there's water.
still, francis gets a little bored/lonely there if there's no kids to latch on to, and i admit i'm not the best mama at playing games with him. he just wants to play catch for like 3 hours. (sigh.)
so, it is that time of year when i remember the carefree days of being a kid in the summer, where there was heat, and flash thunderstorms, running around in the warm summer rain, catching fireflies, and a neighborhood full of kids...and sometimes, ok alot of times, i struggle with what to do with francis because we have none of those things here in seattle.
this summer: i want nature, and art, and science, and playtime to somehow all come together...in that way that rural kids have leg-up advantage. sometimes i'll drag a mexican blanket out onto our "side yard" and we'll read under the trees and look for four leaf clovers, because some days going to a park just seems so cumbersome, when all you really want to do is relax in your backyard. when you don't have a backyard, you have to get a little inventive. i can't blame seattle solely for this, because for years greg and i harbored little dreams of living in new york city, or brooklyn, so i guess, being the city-dwellers that we are: i just have to accept the fact and decide what i'm going to do about it. one summer at a time...
i think this summer i'll be making a list: all the places i want to take francis, all the places he wants to go to, and the Green Lake days that will happen by default. on top of the regular bike-riding, and swimming, and zoo and parks, i want to be diligent in keeping up with summer reading, and trips to museums, rainy afternoons of drawing and (cringe)crafts. (what kind of crafts/busy work does a 9 year old boy like to do?) i want to really scale back on the videogames somehow, and pursue the flights of imagination. somehow. i'm open to suggestion. i'll let you know if anything really clicks. i want francis to have a care-free, fun-filled summer. one that will provide fond memories for when he's older. i'm trying to steer clear of boredom; it's something like a grumpy grandparent that i've learned to live with, but i don't want it for francis. when he says things like he said yesterday: (we saw a raccoon on our way walking to school; it was at the rear of a house, just sitting there in the backyard, licking itself casually, and francis got so excited: he asked me to take a picture with my cell-phone (the raccoon sadly, is but a dot)and exclaimed with wonder: "i've never seen a raccoon IN THE WILD before" and i had to suppress a laugh, as we were a block from 99) i just want the wonder and splendor of life to be at its childhood best...


planting my purple clovers outside our window

(francis wanted me to show you the city raccon. can you see it on the sidewalk? if you click on the photo, it becomes just a tad bigger and you can see it better. i walked back the same way, and it gave me a bit of a fright as it wasn't in the back on the house where we had left it, but was ambling down the front path and then sat on the sidewalk, where it proceeded to continue licking itself, calm, old, and tired.)