Part 2, Indian Summer Weekend

melissa, mason, and maricel went to the pumpkin patch today with our long time friend allison and her children. no husbands on this outing, just the the girls and their kids. i offered to watch mason because he can be such a handful but melissa wanted him to go with them. so instead, i got my maura. maura and i had a date! me and my sweetie! we began the day with a swim at the rec center. we went down the slide at least a million times. on her way down i'd pass/drop her the ball when her chute and her giggly-self was directly below me. she'd do likewise to me on my way down. every now and again we'd do some tandem sliding. the momentum of two hominids sliding down the chute as one made for extra, super-sized giggle sessions. once we got chilled from walking out of the water to climb back up the slide, we'd jump into the hot tub.
man, you gotta love the hot tub. since we originated from the sea, there's always that innate comforting, therapeutic feeling of hot water completely surrounding you, welcoming you especially when you point the parts that ail you directly on the jet. it's such a deep, calming feeling on your muscles. maura and i were soaking up all the hydrotherapy goodness right down to each individual carbon-based cell. then we'd go back into the pool and play around again. up the slide, down the slide, laugh, catch the ball and repeat until hypoglycemic.
another luxuriating, time independent thing i like to do is to completely dry off via our sun's radiative qualities. no towels, just full-on u.v.a, u.v.b, and u.v.c electromagnetic waves irradiating and reigning down on my body (along with some errant neutrinos). so out we go onto the patio which overlooks a giant pond which, in turn's, surrounded by manicured landscaping. there were all manner of pedestrians/cyclists doing loops like stricken wildebeests around the pond dressed in cold weather gear and here we were sitting out on the deck. maura was cold though, so when she could no longer stand the windchill, we went back inside, sat by a window and finished our evaporative drying.
after dinner (which i made), at bedtime maura said, daddy, i had a beautiful day. yup wee maura, me too...

ps i swear, at times kids can be singularly self-defeating but on the flipside they are the reason for parents to strive to become better individuals and by doing so (in)directly imparting themselves (literally and figuratively) onto their chilluns...