Pre-Summer Small Happies
The night storms keep rolling in these days, a glorious prequel to summer — to babies smelling of chlorine and sunscreen, drippy watermelon faces, bare feet and nappies. All our warm clothes have officially been packed away, Halloween decorations taken down, windows scrubbed and opened wider solely for the hope of a little more breeze on those muggy pre-storm afternoons.
And so I’m dropping in with a little pre-summer small happies post today — water our theme, our second home.
Also, it’s Friday. Hip, hip, hooray.
Let it be known that the curse of the older sister lives on.
Billy gets his hair put up, his nails painted, tutus put on and no say in swim wear. And Ella is riding this wave with gusto until he grows old enough to protest. Right now, he loves the attention and we all think he looks cute. Besides, you gotta get embarrassing photos from somewhere to show at your 21st.
We’ve been setting up mini pools in the front garden to cool down each afternoon.
And then escaping to friends’ pools when we can.
Yesterday we upped the game and took a late afternoon trip to our happy place.
I watched as my girl swam everywhere on her own, no longer clutching on to me and saying “Mummy” cautiously. Now her war cry is “Watch me!” and so I watch, and then I cheer, and I see my own childhood in hers — like a fish who came alive in water, spending my entire summers in any I could find.
We ran into friends at the pool and afterwards, we picked up some pizza to top off a fun day and ran into other friends down at the pizzeria. I love this place we live.
A few more small happies pulled from my camera this week:
Ice creams on the front steps.
When we hear the home ice-cream truck ding its bell, we grab our purses and run like crazy to buy a box of our fav ice creams. We stand in the street and chat to the ice cream man and it signals summer to me, another tiny tradition of ours I love.
Reading time.
My two are such book lovers, and often I’ll walk past one of their rooms and find them reading together — Ella turning the pages and putting together half-stories of what she can remember happens in the book and Billy intermittently shouting “duck! wack-wack!”. It makes me so happy.
Getting fancy for the cup.
I’m not a huge fan of horse racing or gambling, but I’ll never say no a fancy dress and a glass of champagne. Joel has a work lunch every year for the Melbourne cup and it’s always a fun afternoon.
Ella and her daddy.
I don’t know why, but this little scene made me so happy this week.
Ella sitting on the kitchen bench, eating an ice block she just made with her dad, listening to some silly story Joel was telling her while he washed up. It was a simple moment they shared, nothing extraordinary was happening but I just felt like the word Family was the size of the entire universe in that moment.
Happy nearly summer you guys!
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Friday Photo Dump (it’s been ages!) — @theredtent on Instagram if you want to follow the feed.
“As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The Red Tent 
One Response to “Pre-Summer Small Happies”
Just so beautiful, I miss you fellas
x xx x x