June Joy

June and all of its lush vegetation is quickly becoming one of my favorite months of the year. A friend of mine said that if you compare summer to a weekend, June is the Friday, and August is Sunday night Freak-out, and I thought that was so true! A big part of the charm of June is how the rest of summer is still stretched out before you with all of its relaxing potential!

Here are some of the things I’ve loved about this past June:

• It’s amazing how green the grass is in June, and how fast it grows. In fact, all the plants that aren’t mowed down grow so quickly. You blink and they’ve doubled in size.
• This was such a good spring for blooming things! The apple trees, the flowering crab trees, the plum trees all around town were just loaded with blossoms, much more so than normal. Peanut Maximus and I appreciated the forsythia, the rhododendron, the irises, the dandelions, the flowers planted in the containers on the back deck, all the things.
• Lupines! Lupines! Lupines! I love them so much! They are everywhere in June, and I finally have a few growing in my wild flowerbed after many years of trying to get them established. This year the plants in the flowerbed were bigger than ever with more blossoms than before, and there are even more babies getting started.
• Peanut Maximus has been busy playing outside, and I’ve loved that he’s much more independent this summer and I can read my book in the hammock while he’s zooming around. I love my hammock.
• Speaking of playing, listening to my little person play, and all the sounds that go with that brings me so much joy. Independent play just keeps getting deeper and more imaginative and full of conversation all the time. It makes me so happy.
• Obviously, having The Banana back for the summer makes everything more joyful!
• Before Mr. TOF broke his wrist, he and Dr. Peds were away to baseball tournaments several weekends in a row, which meant that Peanut Maximus and I had several popcorn suppers. (Dr. Peds doesn’t care for the smell of popcorn, so we don’t usually make it normally). Popcorn suppers are just perfect for a lazy summer day. We pair the popcorn, popped on the stove and topped with butter and salt, with a dish of plain yogurt and some cucumber slices or snap peas, and maybe a few small squares of cheese.
• We’ve been appreciating the extra margin that happens in our schedule when school ends. It means that we don’t have to follow such a strict routine, and our days feel more like a rhythm than a grind.