What summer means to us...

When i was a kid, i loved the changing seasons and all that they stood for. i loved anticipating what fall brings...winter changes, how spring rushes in and how you feel like you just kind of fall into summer...a couple of warm days..and then it hits. summer is finally here.

i have been thinking through what our summer here is like for me. for me and the claire. for drew and i. for our small little family. What are the tastes, sounds, feelings, things that only summer brings and we can relish or laugh about....

a lot of our life revolves around the heat...

like, first i will start with living in a cave. we close all of our shutters so that the sun does not bake our house too much. if we keep the shutters open during the day, it is just too unbearable, even with both our fans running- all the time.

staying up late and sleeping through the heat of the day. i dont know if all parts of the world do this in hot climates, or if we adopted this from our bedouin ancestors here in Jordan, but people really do stay in their homes...all day...until the evening and then they go out.

cold drinks. it just gets the job done.

dinners that don’t use your oven. why? because if you have your oven on for more than 30 minutes and you are in the kitchen, lets just say things start going haywire in your head and all your can think about is getting out...the meal becomes a very secondary thought! ( ok i just read a book about Mt. everest, so i might sound a bit dramatic)

running out of water. that’s right... we get a certain amount of water each week, and then we are cut off. water day is wednesday and we get so excited if we have lasted that long...especially in the summer. we ran out last week ( due to some leaks here and there) and it just felt pretty crazy to be in a house in the summer with no running water. yikes!

after the survival-of-heat section of summer...you have the indulgences of summer.

amazing fresh seasonal fruit. we just finished the season of strawberries, i will be sad to let those go. but we have plums, peaches, watermelon, berries...and CHERRIES! for soo soo cheap that all your friends in america would be sooo jealous of our fresh fruit indulgences. which also translates to a lot of smoothies!

free time. love free time. no school this summer so that means more visits, more treasure hunts, more little excursions to malls and parks and other places we can explore. more reading books, more giggling time. it feels good to have a relief from intensive study and let the words and grammar fall into place a bit as i practise more with just speaking.

and new this summer, i feel like a pioneer women, making all of claire’s food from scratch. ok, i know TONS of women do this in the states, but it just feels so...triumphant. like did i just make and store all this food for my little babe? you go girl.

so we are surviving the heat and soaking in the uniqueness of summertime in amman. our last summer in amman. =(