Yesterday I was reflecting on how I spent most of the Labor Days of my youth. We would typically spend them in my dad’s small hometown, where my paternal grandparents lived. I remember get togethers with grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles and cousins with a picnic, parade and carnival rides that marked the end of summer every year.
In Minnesota, as in many places, there are similar kind of city- or county-wide types of events that mark the end of summer. One is the “great Minnesota get-together,” or the Minnesota State Fair. We missed that this year, due to the timing of Frederick’s arrival, but I wonder if sharing in the Fair, with all its fried food on a stick that it can offer along with about 250,000 of your closets friends (a day!) is really enough the same as sharing memories and playing jenga or even challenging your cousins to see who can stand on one leg the longest in a small town of about 13,000.
I hope we will find a way to provide those same types of memories to our sons. Ones that, on a early fall day, they can look back and smile on as well.
thepercicfamily 