Dealing with the Heat

We have been extraordinarily lucky so far this summer.  St Louis is notorious for the sticky high humidity of its long hot summers and last year I toughed out the morning sickness in the air con of our apartment and harboured nostalgia for the calm sunny days of my Nelson adolescence.  Thus far, it has been a Nelson-y kind of summer and I have managed to get out for some lovely long walks daily with Kazuo and not feel too messy on my return.

But now it is August – and it is fire-y hot and so so humid.  Ugh.  Weekends have been hard work recently, so we decided a few weeks back that in order to make for peace and harmony all round, we should plan some fun things to do.  Like long walks in the many parks around… and picnics… and trips to the pool…  I had made quite the list and we have had some lovely times making inroads on the list.  Yesterday morning we decided to walk in Forest Park, since it some time since we all did that.  We set off around 9.30am, and by then it was already blistering outside.  Sigh.

The walk was lovely.  We walked through the woods in northwest corner of the park and saw our first hummingbird of the season!  (Would like to say this was it… but we were not that quick and our camera not that flash… but you get the idea)  We are very excited about the hummingbirds of MO as we don’t get them anywhere else we have lived.  Akira spotted it first (as per usual, how does he have such eagle eyes?) and wondered what the enormous bee was doing… they are so tiny and perfectly formed.   Would really love to have the patience to put a feeder outside our place and see if any come, but they take a lot more maintenance than the regular feeder.  Speaking of which, we had a little hiatus when we were eaten out of house and home by the gobbly finches, but now have an enormous bag of feed and they are starting to find us again, had a cardinal couple here yesterday, just hoping the gold and house finches come back soon!

At the end of our walk we circled back to the top of Art Hill, towards the massive silver tree in the Art Museum grounds.  I have such vivid memories of coming across it in the brilliance of a post-blizzard day the week we came over for Akira’s interview in 2007 and I love that there are so many great free art works like this in St Louis (including the Art Museum!).

The heat is still killing us though… the rest of the day involved helping Kazuo to deal with heat rash that ensued from the walk and playing the fan on him to cool him down in his little helmet.  Here he is taking a helmet break.  Poor little lad… though his head has stopped being as sweaty as it was at first, but can’t say I would like to be in a plastic helmet in 40degC!  He is a trouper.  Hope it cools down again soon…  Can’t wait for October!