Paradise in summer. 2018

OK, its been a while.  It is the middle of September. My last post was in April.  Every time I write a new post, I say to myself, I have so many ideas, I will write more and have more posts this year.  Don't know what happened when I thought that.  I guess the ideas escaped from my cranium or I just didn't get around to doing a new post and said "oh well".

I would like my posts to be a small history of me, a father, helping to bring up my girls, moreso than a story telling time of my life.  In other words, I should tell more simple banal everyday happenings of my "history" as a father who loves his children and takes the time with them.

I was going to write at the end of the school year and say that that time of the year is rather sad.  The ending of school depresses me.  That is true only for me as a father.  It was never true as a student.  BUT, I have found that all endings are sad.  And to further complicate the matter it seems that everything ends.  The universe will end some day.  But the end of summer is bad too.  Especially when this will be the last time that I have my happy summers with both my girls staying at my Mothers on the lake in the woods.  Sadly, my Mother had to sell the summer house and we can not go there anymore.  It will not be ours.  I have been going there since I was 0, so this is a deadly blow for me.

Also, it was a perfect summer place for my kids.  Studies find that a happy summer for kids makes them stronger people.  And a good summer entails being outside playing and having small adventures.  Its true.  The house was perfect.  A lake 50 feet away to go swimming every day.  I had helped make it into a friendly lake with a sandy sloping bottom which I worked on cleaning out for 45 years, making it sandy and not mucky.  A great place to swim.  Throw the girls off my shoulders from the water.  My younger girl learned how to swim under water this summer and after that happened she didn't want to do anything else.  "How long do I stay under water, Daddy?  Count the seconds."  "I can swim over to the post under water."  She was really into it.  And now she could look for her own small shells on the bottom in the sand.

Ernest Hemingway spent his kid summers in roughly the same area as where we live in the summer.

And it is in the woods with fresh air and nature.  The year round they live in a bowl which captures the dust and pollution.  Here in the summer we live fresh, besides for the gdmd motor boats slowly polluting up the lake, but the air is good, the woods are good, the atmosphere is good. It is paradise for me.

Any father who wants to be more of a dad to his kids at least during some part of the year, should take the advantage of summer vacation to be with his kids, preferably without mother. I worry about men who are impatient and have a short temper, but I think a summer vacation is easier and more relaxed and is thus a good time to bond with the kids.  Besides looking out on the lake from our patio in the woods with the ferns and green and trees with the sun shining off the blue lake, the nicest part was reading to them in the night time and holding their hands before they went to sleep.  No scratch that.  The best was swimming with them.  Or was it throwing the football with them on the dirt road?  Or....?  Just being with the kids with not many hang ups is the best. All the minutes of the day.

I have written about summer before notably here or this one not to mention others and usually it is the same message: 
1.  It is a great time for dads to be with their kids
2. It is usually banal and not very interesting probably for readers
3. It is paradise

Its the same message today.  Like it or leave it.

More pictures just to spruce things up.