An Affair To Remember

Remember back when you were in Elementary School? ....Jr. High? ..... High School? College?

Remember when you fell in love with someone and practiced writing your name with their last name all over your notebook? Because it was fun. And you wanted to see what it would look like at the bottom of your checks from your joint bank account? Whoa, flashback! Remember checks? 


It's been a while since I did that now that I'm all married and stuff, but yesterday we got a piece of mail that made me fall in school-girl-love all over again. With a very unlikely candidate.

The HOA.

I'm not even lying. I am not generally a HOA lover. In fact often I'm downright annoyed by the HOA and in the interest of full disclosure I think I'll never live in an HOA controlled area again.

But this. This extension of the pool season has me all sorts of whooped again.

Daddy & Tommy have a routine when Daddy comes home from work.

Tommy hears the door open downstairs and his makes his fake-surprised face with his lips all O-shaped while he gasps and I say "who could it be?" Then he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls over to the top of the stairs to peek around the corner.

Daddy thumps and bumps and drops his shoes and keys and other noisy things, then starts to stomp up the stairs while Tommy waits anxiously to see if it really is Daddy coming up here. It always is.


Daddy crawls up the last few stairs so he's already on his hands and knees when he reaches Tommy and says "Hi my fam-i-leeeee!!!!" and Tommy gives him hugs and kisses. By now my heart is mush and I've breathed my sigh of relief signifying that we might survive the rest of the night now that Daddy is home.

After a bit of post-work wrestling Tommy drags Daddy to his bathroom to find his "simma-suit up high!!!" (because we store his swimsuit draped over the shower curtain rod where it dries) and begins to demand that they go to the "poo! poo! poooooool!!!!!!"

The boys swim for a couple of hours and come home water-logged, exhausted and hungry. Tommy walks straight to the bathroom to splash in the tub for a second before jammies, dinner and bed. He initiates all of these activities, pointing to the next step in the process and dragging the adults around by their pointer fingers.

This is why I knew my life would be over after Labor Day when the pool closed and Josh entered full-blown over-worked, under-paid, exhausted, unavailable student/bread-winner mode.

This is why the pool staying open through the month of September gives me a new kind of hope that I simply can't explain.

Maybe my life isn't over.

Besides, Amy Lavina HOA doesn't sound so bad. Does it?