The first days of summer

It doesn't quite feel like summer yet, since our temperatures have remained cool, but we've done a few things since Memorial Day that suggest the season is actually here.

Memorial Day proper we spent in Delaware celebrating Tom's parents' 40th wedding anniversary, together with all Edith's cousins.

Standing at the altar where they were married, 40 years later

The clan as it has grown in those 40 years

After a visit to the church and a picnic, we hit the boardwalk in Rehoboth. Edith and Santiago are experts at the rides now and had great fun together. What could be better than a place where rides are still 50 cents, and there's never a line? Compare to Edith's inaugural ride two years ago.

Edith was intent on trying out all the forms of transportation the boardwalk had to offer the toddler set. I did steer her away from the airplanes, even though in many respects they look like the most fun: Not having changed since WWII, these little flyers designed for tots each have a machine gun trained on the crowd below that all the kids are busy shooting. I figured we could skip that.

The helicopters posed no such problem. Tom, Edith, and Santiago whooped it up.

Despite living their whole lives less than two miles from the beach (the aerial photograph of their farm that hangs on Pappy's wall shows the shore right beyond the treeline), Tom's parents are emphatically not beach people, so we rarely spend our time in Delaware on the sand. But Mom-mom and Pop-pop kindly acquiesced after the rides and let Tom and Edith skip down to the water's edge for five minutes.

Maggie and Edith had just as much fun running around the yard.

Maggie, Edith, and Santiago enjoyed a delicious, homemade strawberry shortcake, courtesy of Mom-mom.

The whole gang, at ages 7, 3, 4, 3, and 3. Compare to an earlier incarnation.

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Now that Tom is on church staff full-time, our Sundays at church usually run from 8:30 to about 2pm, meaning not much of an afternoon is left by the time we have lunch and change. And then there's Edith's nap. So this past Sunday we went straight from church to pick strawberries, not stopping to pass go or change our clothes, lest we never get out the door again.

Unlike her first strawberry picking venture at the same farm two years ago, Edith understood the difference between red and green berries this time, and she also understood that you can't eat your berries until you've paid for them. Unlike that time, however, she was much more intent on cheering her parents on to fill her quart box for her than in going after the berries herself.