Oh, what do you do in the summertime?

It was hot today.

Our swimmers were hosed down with cold water while they swam because the pool was a little too warm to work out in. It was hot yesterday morning—hot enough that we got hot just playing around and had to go home to cool down. 

We didn't plan on extra pool time today because...it was just too hot.

But our little neighbour knocked on the door asking if they could have phase two of the water fight they started last night. 

"Only this time can we use your hose?" he requested. "Because my dad is working. I can bring all my water balloons! I just need a grown up to fill the tub with water!"

So that's just what we did because...it was hot!

We brought out one of our empty bins as well. I haven't decided on the fate of this bin yet (it doesn't have a lid) but it made an excellent little pool today. 

Here's Phoebe dancing around in the arc of water from the hose (I had to keep making water rainbows for the kids to run under while I filled the bins with water).

And there's our little friend spraying Phoebe with water while I also am spraying her with water:

The kids used shooters and refillable balloons to soak each other (when they weren't taking turns submerging themselves in the bins).

It was a wonderful way to cool off in the middle of the afternoon.

Phoebe fit into the bins the best, but Alexander wasn't afraid to get in either.

Eventually I got too hot to sit outside and realized that Andrew's window (where he was working) looks directly out at the hose/tubs of water. So he took over watching the kids until they decided that even playing in cold water in the shade was too hot of an activity. The kids help little J lug all his things back to his house and then came inside.

Mostly the kids just want to play video games when they're inside lately.

And mostly we've just...let them...because the past few weeks have been...a lot.

We've just been so busy with packing and working and swim team that, like, a little brain rot didn't seem like too much of an issue. Besides, our schedule is going to have a major overhaul in the next few weeks so it's not like this is going to be a permanent schedule.

That said, Phoebe has also been enjoying painting the last little while. The paints are no longer hidden in the cupboard—they're out in the open. And Phoebe knows that whatever she doesn't use up is just going to be thrown (or given) away before we leave, so she's been doing her best to waste not (she's already used up an entire tray of paints). Plus, the packers left behind a huge stack of packing paper (I told them about it and they said they didn't want it so it was ours), so she has a lot of paper to work with as well.  

Here she is painting a diving board the other day:

And here she is today (yes, we need to take down our birthday sign) painting away once again:

I sat and painted with her, following some tutorials from Watercolors by Bree, which was really quite fun (her Instagram seems to have more videos than her YouTube channel). I'm far from professional...and I'm not sure that this toddler tray of jumbo tempera cakes is precisely the best medium, but...it the tutorials helped me feel like I could at least paint something (when usually I feel like I can't paint anything).