Today was one of those days. It. Was. Hot.

We swam, we tidied up the yard, we swam some more. Nobody had any end-of-summer energy left. A heat-wave of depression blew over us and we sat baking by the curiously drawn chalk outline of a “circle” that I denied looked surprisingly similar to Mommy’s body on the driveway.

Chloe would cheer, “Mommy chase me!” and it would take everything in my power not to pass out and lay in the exaggerated pear-shaped pattern reflecting back at me from the pavement.

We tried going for a bike ride but the girls became irritable and started cutting each other off so we had to resort to the threat of taking something away. Today it was easy–today, we threatened to remove the promise of family movie night. When you can’t easily find something the kids covet enough to fight for, it can make for an even longer day. If you say things like, “if you’re not behaving, you won’t be able to walk to the mailbox to retrieve the mail.” If that’s the best you’ve got, you might as well not even bother getting out of bed in the morning.

There is nothing holier in our house than family movie night. It almost always involves popcorn and sometimes even a sugary drink which trumps the actual movie watching every time.

The girls did act out a few times and Greg, whose personal humidex reading was off the charts, ordered one of them to sit on a brown chair. We were already all sitting on various brown chairs. Note to self—patio furniture comes in a plethora of colours.

Neighbours asked us to walk their dogs, we ate ice cream thinking it would cool us off but it only made us thirsty. Someone saw a mirage of a giant pond where the bucket of chalk used to be.

I blamed the heat for a few acts of aggression between the girls. Chloe walked up and slapped Hanna’s back and when she realized I had been the first witness on the scene she was quick to lie and say, “She hit me Mommy.” Oh no she di’int, but I couldn’t order her to a brown chair so I had to dangle the movie test in front of her. She cared a lot more about her chalk drawing being smudged.

I heard screaming while the girls prepared for their showers. When I walked down the hallway I heard, “Nothing but two great buds in here Mom! Everything’s fine!”

This one reeks of someone either bleeding or severely bruised as the quickness of the cover up was too convincing and I’m pretty sure I only heard one voice which meant someone might have been duct-taped to the back of the door.

Chloe started wrestling with her toy phone. She pressed the same button over and over so the song never played to completion causing the ringing in my head from the heatstroke to sound exponentially worse. I threatened to take away the phone and she quickly found a brown chair to sit on. This was the first time I had threatened to take a phone away from one of our kids and I’m certain, it won’t be the last.

I watched as Chloe became frustrated trying to put a Barbie flip-flop first over her big toe unsuccessfully and then on her pinky-finger. Heat.

I witnessed Hanna tying thousands of pipe cleaners together to form a trail the length of our street and scream when she couldn’t figure out where the ends of the chain were. Heat.

They started asking random questions.

“What is face time?”

“Why is it called a Grandfather clock?”

“When someone says they’re going to wipe it from the face of the earth…um?”

At the end of the day, the end of the summer, the end of pool season, I heard a sweet little voice say, “Mommy, I have to tell you a secret.”

Leaning in, expecting a hug, maybe a sweet little kiss on my cheek, I heard the following farewell to summer whisper in my ear.

“I…..love……make-up.”