Summer Salad (with a Dash of Kids)

This year June seemed to last forever, yet here we are at the final day of this most beautiful month. Could it stay awhile , cool as it was and lovely every day? Alas no, it cannot.In its last week we looked in on our younger grandson’s First Grade Show and Tell Day, arriving nice and early in our cool summer clothes.We admired his artwork, and played on the classroom terminals,      ate strawberries and bagels outside and watched as he said goodbye for now to his best friend Diego.Then this past Friday we kicked off summer.  We went to Legoland...then dropped off little Miss Sundress at her house and continued on, taking her two big brothers away for the weekend, where Auntie Annie, pregnant on not still did all the cooking for us .On Saturday, the guys in the family chatted away, and hit golf balls. We had a fire, and when bedtime came we made a bed on the floor that everyone wanted to sleep in, even me. Even though it was on the floor of my own bedroom.                         Next morning, there was a game of Sorry with David Marotta the Younger and Auntie Annie,  as Annie and John’s  puppy Archer, who is the size of a large file cabinet, kept Annie’s growing baby warm.The boys fought some of the time and we found out that now, as grandparents we're not quite as good as we once were at taking that in stride. (At one point, when they were hitting each other with OUR i-Pads I snatched them both out of their hands and all but clashed them together like cymbals. At another, David-Marotta-the-Larger picked up Mini-David-Marotta the way a man might pick up a bag of laundry and carried him by the waist into our room where he made him lie for ten minutes on his improvised bed on the floor, while 'Papa' lay on our bed, calmly doing his crossword, same as always.) Nothing came of these small microbursts I'm happy to say. The boys know how we love them and are ever merry and loving back, and as we began the longish drive to return them home again, the car was full of laughter and the eating of McDonalds.And now it’s June 30^th, with a short week ahead and summer, summer, summer stretching like that big happy  dog of Annie and John's before he thuds to the floor all puppyish elbows and knees.