What We've Been Up To: Girls of Summer

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Girls of Summer

My little ballerina has been begging me to allow her to have a sleepover with her girlfriends for months now. Actually, it's been pretty much non-stop begging since her birthday sleepover in March. We have been so busy with school and track and tax season that I haven't gotten a day to do it for her. Well, once school got out I had no more excuses. We met the girls around noon, spent some time at the beach on the lake and then came back here for a night of giggles and girlishness.

My personal favorite time of the night though, was when it was about 8:30 and the girls had gone up to their room for "bedtime". They were up there no more than 10 minutes and came down and peeked around the corner, looking like this picture. They proclaimed, "We can't sleep! We tried and it's been like THIRTY HOURS. It's almost MIDNIGHT!"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt

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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Girls of Summer