Summer Reruns -- So long, summer

From August 18, 2011.

Summer has sauntered into the sunset.

I know there are a couple of weeks of August left. The State Fair is still on. Labor Day has yet to arrive.

But when your kids, in new shoes, backpacks packed, are bouncing out the door and down the street to school, you know summer's licked. The pool is deflated. The sparklers are spent.

Fourth grade and first grade now. Time flies. My younger daughter, Ella, was chatting away on a toy cellphone the other day. “Who are you talking to?” I asked. “My boyfriend,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Just my dad,” she says to toy phone boyfriend, eyes rolling.

Still, it was a high-quality summer.

It was a season of sport. Tess played hoops and soccer. Ella, as I wrote previously, gave softball a try. They are a study in contrasting styles.

Tess scores a soccer goal and meets our cheers with a slight, embarrassed smile and shrug. Ella walks to the batter's box, giving me the “eyes here, pal” finger point. “Turn the video camera on, dad,” she orders.

There was the first big backyard campout. No, sweetie, we swear bears are not indigenous to north Marion.

Ella's birthday sleepover included eight delightful little guests. “That doesn't look like a mermaid,” one little friend yelled, looking at the elaborate cake my wife painstakingly and lovingly picked out.

Did you know a powerful maternal glare can light candles? I did not.

No school in the summer, but the learning never stops. Our day care takes great field trips, like one to the Hoover museum. “Hoover was a person who did things,” Ella said in her most authoritative tour guide voice. “And he was president of the Great Depression,” Tess interjected.

Tess developed a complex safety protocol for use when tornado warning sirens blow - scream, cry, run downstairs, wrap yourself in a sleeping bag, yell at the TV weathercasters for frightening us and eat pretzels. “What does the red mean? What does the red mean?” she screeched in vain at the Doppler radar. Someday, she will found the Irrational Weather Service.

With very little help, Ella threw off the surly bonds of training wheels. She flatly rejected my fatherly advice, but a few days later, there she was, tooling down the street. “I just pushed off the ground and peddled. And then I got it,” she said. Fast learner. We need to start hiding the car keys.

Ella was cast as “sassy girl” at theater camp, reprising her role from our July vacation. “Antique malls, why do they even build them?” she said when grandma made us take an antiquated detour.

A good question, among many, many, many. Now, you can ask your teachers.