Summer Inception

My family enjoyed a relaxing July 4th weekend. After Saturday morning's swim meet, we followed no schedule in meals or errands. On Sunday we got up late, ate breakfast around 9:30am, scrounged up lunch around 2pm, and never left the house except for a mid-morning Costco run. This trip was surprisingly laid-back, sans teeming crowds because Costo actually was not packed with hungry customers in a hurry.

The cloudy skies made us even sleepier and by 3pm, everyone was napping. Around 5pm, my younger daughter -- who had fallen asleep on the family room couch around 2:30pm -- wandered upstairs (where everyone else was snoozing) and into my room and groggily asked, "What time do we have to get up?" Then she climbed up onto the bed and chattered about a funny YouTube video, her question quickly forgotten.

Soon everyone trooped downstairs for dinner. My daughter queried, "Why are we eating dinner again? What about breakfast?" Puzzled silence by all. She persisted, "And why didn't anyone bring me upstairs to sleep? Why did you all leave me downstairs by myself? Why did you all sleep in your clothes?"

Then it dawned on us all: she thought that we had slept overnight and that Sunday night was Monday morning. To her, the sunless, gray skies looked like 5am, not 5pm. So the movie "Inception" is right: time passes much more quickly in a dream than in reality. My daughter passed 8 hours during a 2-hour nap.

Hey -- let's slow down, not speed up, these lazy summer days.