School’s out for…70 days, but who’s counting? Yesterday was the kids’ last (half) day of school. I glued on Mac’ the Mac wagon’s new eyes, packed him up with towels, sunblock, assorted swim masks, bathing suits, and a cute little mini wallet with just the essentials (license, $20 snack bar money, Charlie card, JP Licks card), and lugged him out the door. His eyes fell off before I made it out the front gate, so I did what any good surgeon would and left them on the kitchen counter, glue side up. Then I hauled Mac 1.6 miles to the kids’ school and arrived right at 12:30 on the dot.

I found a new trick to make them smile in photos. “The person with the biggest smile gets extra ice cream!” Check out the results:

Between my promptness and my new photo trick, I was feeling pretty proud of myself, especially as we headed towards JP Licks for our Summer Kick Off Sundaes and everyone we passed admired Mac, even without his sparkly eyes.

Then I realized I left the pool passes at home. Let us take this moment to whatever-the-modern-equivalent-of-raising-the-roof is for my nephew, Ryan. He picked up my Bat signal and dropped everything to hand deliver the pool passes and save me from about two miles of whilking (whine-walking) back home and then to the train station. It takes a village, guys.

Bellies full of ice cream and mini wallet full of pool passes, we headed to the train station, stopping only at our awesome local bookstore with a less than awesome name, Papercuts, per Hazy’s request. George immediately accosted the woman who works there, “WHERE ARE YOUR STAR WARS BOOKS?” like we were robbing a bank.

Fortunately, she stayed calm and opened the safe/found the one Star Wars book. I did not buy it, because I’m a Mick Jagger parent. You can’t always get what you want. 

It was a beautiful day for the pool. I love the walk through the North End; it’s pretty and it’s short enough that there’s minimal whining. There are a few narrow sidewalks, where groups of people insist on taking up the whole thing, but luckily I had George acting as my Fezzik, only instead of “EVERYBODY MOVE!”, he’d go, “Excuse me! Wagon coming through!”

We swam, had snacks, played frisbee (read: narrowly avoided whacking various people in the head with the frisbee), and took a brief break at the playground to warm up.

It was a really good day, and it became a great day when we were talking back to the T and passed this golden retriever with a party hat on, BECAUSE IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY. Happy birthday, buddy!

I don’t know about you, but I plan on treating the rest of summer like it’s that doggy in the birthday hat and celebrating the crap out of it.