Splash in to Summer

When I think back to my childhood, I recall one of my favorite aspects of summer being running around in a swimming suit all day and playing in water.  Most of this time was spent actually swimming at the swimming pool but there was plenty of activities involving sprinklers, water fights, water balloons, wading pools and the good old garden hose with it's icy water straight from the chilled underground reservoir that supplies the rural areas of Traill County with delicious and perfectly flavorless water.  Dang, do I love drinking hose water.  I know there is a library of articles saying that this is bad and hose water is full of chemicals leached from the hose.  This research is from the last few years but I am just going to pay attention to the evidence of generations of adults that are walking around who did this as children who had nothing happen to them.  The research says it's not as bad as long as you run the water that has been sitting in the hose out first.  Well, obviously, everyone would do that before drinking it because who wants the hot sun water?

This weekend we were at my parents house for farming and it was legitimately hot like summer on Saturday.  My dad took Ben with him to hook up the garden hose and of course the inevitable happened.  He ended up soaking wet and covered in mud since my parents haven't landscaped around their house yet and they live surrounded by a gravel pit full of weeds.  I only brought one pair of shorts for him and one pair of tennis shoes since he doesn't have sandals for this summer yet.  As a result, he ended up spending most of Saturday in this getup:

 

I happened to have his swimming suit with and his rain boots have been in my travel shoe tote bag(yes, I have a tote of shoes that I bring with me everywhere) all spring.  Perfect! 

 

Time to head out to the field! 

 

The morning before we came home, Ben was out in a field somewhere and picked up an assortment of dried corncobs from last year.  Now they are his treasures.

 

Yayyy...dried corn seed in the living room!  Actually, I don't mind.  The entertainment he gets from it is worth it and it's not that hard to clean up.  The challenge is keeping Tessa from interfering with his farm setup.  There was also a very traumatic incident where Allan plopped his body down on a pile of corn so he could relax.