The soft serve vanilla ice cream at the pool somehow never tasted as good toward the end of the summer. Perhaps it was because my brother Taylor and I knew that school would resume soon and there would be no more freezer ice pops at the beach, purple Gatorade at softball games or virgin frozen daiquiris by the lake. Instead, we merely could look forward to brown bag lunches with soggy turkey sandwiches and lukewarm yogurt. No, we never were ready for school to begin.\nIn an attempt to make the final week of summer vacation more pleasant, my mother would allow us each to choose a favorite restaurant, and we then knew the countdown had begun. As we savored our final days of freedom, we would set out to enjoy our "lasts": our last trip to the children's museum, our last night swim, our last dinner out on a weeknight.
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