Texan heat, here we come!

We are off for a family vacation to Dallas tomorrow. Yeah, I know lot of people have asked me why Dallas? When has Dallas become a popular spot for vacation and that too in summer. Well, my answer is 'Family'. Viral's family lives there and when you have kids there is comfort in going to places where you have family and home. I hear the temperatures there haven't hit the 100s yet so it may not be that bad. Besides there are lovely indoor pools and water parks to visit there. I will most certainly post the pictures after we are back. This is the third year in a row we are off to Dallas for the July 4th weekend. So Texan heat, here we come again!

Cleaning is theraputic

When you are home all day with two toddlers, as naughty and hyperactive as mine, you need doses of energy supplements and pain relievers every now and then. And instead of popping half a dozen pills, you begin to explore solutions best available right around you. When I was single, meaning with no kids, shopping at a mall was the most effective means of beating my blues. Even getting a $5 trinket coupled with couple of hours of window shopping was best to get me in the best of the moods. Well with that being a luxury these days, I had to find other stress busters around the house. Lately I have realised that cleaning up and organizing household stuff had the same effect. Not necessarily scrubbing the floors or doing the dishes but simple stuff like organizing kids' toys in their bins, labeling them, organizing the closets, putting batteries in the toys, arranging books in the book closet, downloading photos from the camera onto the laptop and AppleTV and just simple things like that. Most of the stuff really takes 30 mins or less but at the end of the day there is a sense of having accomplished something. And again the rewards are in those countless genuine smiles that flash up when a dormant choo-choo gets going again or one of their favorite books that was misplaced for weeks shows up in the closet again.

cherries, cherries and more cherries

Last weekend we set out for a picnic to Brentwood, the heart of Cherry farms in western California. The cherries were in full bloom but we missed other fruits like nectarines, peaches, apricots etc. We'd have to wait atleast a month more for those to be out in full bloom for picking but we were happy to just go pick cherries. Ripe, luscious and mouth-watering cherries were sitting in large looms waiting to be picked. The kids had fun picking at the low hanging bunches and shooting them straight into their mouths while we climbed the trees to grab the large ones looming at the top.