If you ask my kids, and I don't recommend it, but if you ask them how summer has been, they will tell you it has been pretty boring.

Nothing chaps my hide more than kids who believe that doing whatever they fancy most of the time is boring. Imagination. Use it. Am I right?

With the BlogHer conference approaching quickly, work has been crazy busy for me for the last couple of weeks. Those days where I could work poolside while the kids splashed and played have temporarily evaporated along with our summery weather. It's been overcast and windy this last little bit, not exactly swimming weather.

My oldest has been missing her friends over the summer - and one friend in particular. They both participate on an online drawing site and talk on the phone, but they haven't really seen each other.

This last Saturday, my daughter announced that we would be going to the park at 10am, and her friend would be meeting us there with her mom. And so, that's what we did.

I need to back up a bit. Before we went to the park, I had to run to the pharmacy to pick up my medicine - an ordeal that totally needs a whole blog post of its own. The van, although I had cleaned it out just the week before, had a sickly fruity fermenty rotty smell going on, and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from... until I looked in the trunk and saw that the watermelon I had bought two days before and apparently not taken into the house with the rest of the groceries for some reason had developed a crack and leaked juice all over the floor of the trunk.

OH MY GAAAAAAAAH that smelled bad. I sponged and soaked and sponged and toweled and sponged and sprayed with carpet cleaner and scrubbed and toweled some more. And it was GRODY.

And the net result of all that effort was that the van reeked for several days, of both nasty rotting fruit and chemicals.

Okay, so back to the park. We hung out playing and letting the big girl catch up on a whole summer's worth of whatever they talk about. I walked some laps around the park with her friend's mom, and got some sun on my face. Red noses are what's in this year. Don't let anyone try to tell you differently.

After the park, we piled back into the stankmobile and went out for a nice lunch and ran some errands. Once we were back at home, we relaxed for a bit, but then I got really restless and demanded that we get out of the house.

We weighed our options, and decided on miniature golf. Even better, we decided on Anything Goes mini golf, so we didn't have any disagreements or drama.

I did mean Anything Goes, you know. My husband tried to teach them the right way, he really did.

Basically, this resulted in my son running two holes ahead, my oldest smirking as she putted and my youngest celebrating like she just won the masters after every hole, whether or not she put the ball in the cup using her hands instead of the club.

After mini-golf, we headed into the arcade, and the kids got skooled in pinball by their father, who apparently is quite good at it.

Then we headed off for In N Out burger at 9:30 pm. On the way home, drowsy in the backseat, the kids all agreed - this was a very good day.