A break from the heat

Think of the first few weeks of a baby's life: wanting to nurse, going through all the right motions and not quite succeeding. For the last few days you could just feel the clouds aching to let it rain. I've heard of people getting headaches because the whole earth wanted to rain, but for some reason it just couldn't figure out how to go about it. After a false start on Wednesday, the clouds finally let loose early this morning, and we got a good drenching.

Kate was ecstatic. When she peered out the windows this morning, she came bounding in my room, begging for her rain boots. We found her boots and Reagan's boots, and I let the girls tromp around in the puddles outside our house. I wish you could have heard their excited shouting as they exclaimed from puddle to puddle. Reagan was exuberant and surprised that once she had splashed all the water out of one puddle, there would another puddle that she hadn't noticed before just a few hops away.

The adults, safely sheltered inside, decided to open all the windows and let the house take a deep breath of fresh air. So, we turned of the air conditioner (yes, we had to turn them off because they were running), and opened all the windows with screens on them. There are a total of four. Then, I stood in the doorway and shooed away any bugs that might try to fly into the house. I doubted that there would be very many since the rain was coming down with a vengeance.

It was wonderful to be able to take a walk in the middle of the afternoon, but even then, by the time we got home, we were all ready for copious draughts of water and lemonade. Georgie downed a bottle and worked a couple of sips of water into her system. I used my oven for the first time in about a month and made bread in the middle of the day instead of at night. I even put a load of laundry in the dryer.

Most of you might not realize that drying clothes, baking and cooking all occur long after the sun has gone down. Because once our house is hot, it stays hot and refuses to cool down even with the air conditioners running. We're pretty sure it is because of the lack of insulation, but we're working on that. Hopefully we'll get another portion of this house done before the beginning of August.