The garbage trucks hit our street as early as five, or as late as six some mornings. I dress the kids and feed them as the hub finishes his shower. As the kids tuck into their first breakfast (a second is served at school), I head out the door, handing off the kids to the hub.

The last few mornings, the outdoors have smelled of a Junior Burger with cheese, sweet onions, and mustard. Since I live in the middle of sublurbia, at least four hours drive from a What-A-Burger (instead of a few blocks, as in a previous life), there’s only one reason I should be hallucinating the taste of a hot burger with a side of onion rings and a coke in my mouth, the scent of hot grease and pickles in my car, and the crinkle of paper as the meal sloshes around corners as we drive. I ate there a lot as a young adult.

It’s only 300 miles or so to get my fix, though. I could call in for a day off, drive out, drive back, and have a “me” day, listening to music, touring the state, spend the last few hours of my day on the beach before I leap back to responsible old me…

Amazing how I’m tasting the wildfires in the air and my brain turns it into What-A-Burgers. The other day, when someone had torched the lake again, I was tasting green chilies roasting. Some things you don’t even realize you’ve learned and how they connect to your brain.

With my kids, learning and habit is very heavily audio and repetition based. It helps when they’re exploring new things, and making those connections. Singing the alphabet song while hand-washing to wash ‘long enough’. Knocking with a specific kid’s tune cadence to let Daddy know that not only is someone at the door, it’s us.

Wolfie’s current bedtime story preferences are from the Magic School Bus series. Some books he just nods through. He’s fascinated by the pictures showing the class shrinking down and swimming through a water collection and filtration plant, but the pieces don’t really fit in his brain. He’ll ask me to read every word on the page, from the story text to the sidebar facts, through the kid’s conversation bubbles.

But the senses book we blow through, using it only casually as a short guide to exploring what it’s talking about: touch, taste, smell, vision, hearing. We taste the bedsheet and decide it doesn’t taste blue. But we can feel the texture with our tongues. We use toys to build our own giant sized eardrum and inner ear bones, hitting the “drum” and causing the “bones” to tickle the nerve (his arm) all the way up to the hearing center of his brain. We put the backs of our hands on each others throats as we hum, “touching” the noise we are making. We run water in the tub and have a duck race, racing them down the tub lane using wave motion with out actually touching the ducks.

I love this stage. I know I say it about most stages of their lives, how much I love it, and how it gets better and better, and it does.

We’re moving them from a private education system to a public one this fall; part of the plan we’d worked out for our family years ago. Move to an area we like, with a mixed demographic and involved local community. Supplement their daily education with adventures everywhere in the real world, be they out of books or exploring our own back yard or neighborhood walking park. The supplementing is modeled after what our own parents did for us, showing us the adventures and treasures everywhere, as life permitted.

And we get to have the fun of exploring like a kid all over again. Follow our noses and see where we go.

What adventures have you planned for the summer? Or have found you lately?