Hot child in the city

Poor K, when I picked her up from school yesterday it was 101 degrees. Shocking since her school is always at least ten to fifteen degrees cooler than by our house. I expected to see lethargic kids with bright red cheeks moping around, instead I saw happy faces that had been in an air conditioned classroom for most of the day. K was still in the classroom like always and I had to fish her out. So happy she loves school! We were supposed to go over to a friend's house for a swimdate but it was canceled due to illness. I was the unfortunate bearer of bad news. K's now sweaty face (from the one minute walk) was pouty with a twinge of pissedoffness and somehow I was responsible. It was all downhill from there. She demanded that I find another playmate for the afternoon, why do kids think the world is available to them 24/7? As we walked into our house we were met by a wall of heat, for a second I thought the house was on fire. Really.

Then the real complaining started, I already had a headache from the heat and it was about to get worse. It was Monday and the mountain of homework was in K's backpack. I emptied the folder and started the piling process: One pile for the weeks homework, one pile for the paperwork I had to look over and one pile for all the work from last week. K's frumpy face was eager for me to see her spelling test, she even managed a smile. I knew she would do well with the words, it was the new dictation sentences that had me worried. Even in the heat the look of joy on my face was visible, she did so well her teacher wrote "perfect" on her paper. I looked at her sweet sweaty face and decided to forget the homework, the girl were going swimming. This made up for the canceled playdate and the heat. There's nothing my little girl loves more than swimming with a parental.

It felt so good to dive into the 85 degree water. Usually I find this temperature bath-like but with the thermometer at 101 it was downright cool. Usually we stay in too long the air outside is so cold we can't get out, this time it was the opposite. Getting out to fetch toys was awful. We stayed in for quite a long time, long enough, we hoped, for the kitchen to go back to double digits. It did not, we had a salad for dinner, the thought of turning on the stove or oven was frightful.

It took her a while to fall asleep, her room, usually the coolest in the house, was uncomfortably hot. I assume by this time you've realized that we lack air conditioning in our abode. Years ago they didn't take climate change into consideration when building this close to the beach. At about 10PM D and I got sick of sweating and took our conversation to the pool where we floated around until our core temperature was back to normal. The cool summer made me forget how much I love the night swim.

Tuesday brought the numbers down a little but not much. When I picked K up from school it was still a bit much for me. This time we had no choice but to do homework and given our moods it didn't go well. We were both relieved when it was time for karate, a break from the heat and homework was quite necessary. In the dojo the main topic of conversation was the heat. It was the one thing we all could agree on, not one person was happy to see the mercury rise so high. Exhausted karate moms sat slumped in chairs complaining about heat induced headaches and sinus infections. The one good thing about the heat? It was high enough to kill some of the "crap" that was going around the schools. Of course heatstroke is worse than a cold but luckily none of our kids succumbed to that.

When we got home the temperature had fallen slightly but the sun was out blazing. Back to the pool and salad for us. K asked me if this heat would ever go away and I told her that it had only been 48 hours, what about people that lived in it every day? I told her to think about how it's always going to be worse somewhere else. She thought about it and said "if you move somewhere and you know it's going to be hot then that's what you get." I suppose she's right. It's not the heat that's pissing us off it's the timing of the heat. Had this been July or August we'd be in the pool every day or at the beach. The heat is so convenient during summer vacation, not so much during the school year. How dare it come late!!

I guess this heat is another example of "I want what I want, when I want it!"

It's a good thing I'm back to Dr. Phil tomorrow!