Feeling Hot Hot Hot

Holy crap it’s hot around here. We tied a record on Saturday (which was set in 1999, when we were conveniently in Italy on our honeymoon) and had a heat index of 103 yesterday. So naturally, we spent a lot of the weekend outside.
On Saturday morning, we got up bright and early to head out to the Arlington & Alexandria Community Bike Ride. The ride thankfully started at 8:30am, and was only 6.4 miles (we were on the “family” ride, the full ride was 23 miles and went through Arlington on bike lanes, which we weren’t quite p for). Of course, it was so humid out, there was a thick fog that didn’t really burn off until we had finished the ride around 10am. The kids did fairly well, except for the one bit where Evan’s helmet slipped forward and he couldn’t see anything. He was sweating like crazy by the end though. Ellie was great, helping Evan with his water bottle and food. Lisa managed to pull her old Huffy all the way through, even up the last super steep hill. And we all loved the water mister tent at the end.
After the ride we picked up Ellie’s friend Claire, and hopped in the baby pool for a bit to cool off until heading downtown to Georgetown. We hit Five Guys for dinner, and Ellie actually finished her whole burger (minus the piece she donated to Evan). Then we walked over to Holy Trinity Church to watch our neighbors perform in an Irish dance recital. Ellie LOVED the whole thing, so we may be stuck spending a lot of money to sign her up for those classes. It was quite the range of talent at the recital. There were kids who had qualified for national and world championships, down to the kids who were brand new, but still better than me, where half the class was going one direction, and the other half the opposite, resulting in comical crashes. Like I said, Ellie loved the whole thing, and we stayed to the end, at 9pm. We narrowly avoided getting caught in a heat-generated thunderstorm, which had quite the impressive lightning show.
The next morning, we got up early again, this time to head down to the zoo for a meerkat class. Ellie and Claire learned about meerkat guards, how to dig with their eyes closed, and other fun stuff. Thankfully, I had parked at the bottom of the hill that the zoo is built on, so we slowly made our way down after having some lunch from On The Fly, hitting every water mister along the way. Evan finally crashed near the lions and tigers, so I took him into one of the restaurants to cool off and nap.
After we got home and Claire’s parents picked her up, we were lucky enough to get invited to the neighborhood pool (we don’t yet have a membership, so we must beg to get invited as guests). Evan was a little freaked out by the big pool, maybe there were too many people or something. But he eventually warmed up to it when I started playing with him. And he really liked the baby pool. Ellie of course had a great time, but she is still scared of putting her head underwater, and she really has no idea what she’s doing when I tell her to kick and try to swim. Still, the pool was extremely useful for cooling off after a hot weekend. Now, if we could just get that membership.