My sister Elena and sister-in-law Kenly, two of Jack’s and Liam’s beloved aunties, both live in Brooklyn. They recently sent me this photo of Jack looking drunk with really big hair taken at our favorite restaurant in Southampton, and since I’ve been really needing a distraction from the feeling of carrying a bowling bowl around on top of my pelvis due to my current, torturous bladder infection, the photo thankfully transported me to summer days.

Oban is fond of saying that we do the Hamptons “ghetto style.” And while I’m not so sure about that, we certainly do it suburban style, often commuting about one hour from my parents’ house on Long Island (where we live for several weeks each summer) to the glorious Cooper’s Beach in Southampton with a car full of boys, pails, shovels, beach towels, boogy boards, and Starbucks, parking the Volvo we borrowed from my mother amid rows of spanking new BMW and Lexus SUV’s. We stay at the beach, intoxicated by the rhythmic, buoyant waves, the sparkling ocean and the sun, long after the familiar lifeguards whistle their last call, while the boys climb and leap off the deserted lifeguard stands into piles of soft, warm sand.

We then wrestle a worn out pair of sandy boys with raccoon eyed sunburns (since we never manage to apply sunscreen to their eyelids) into the chilly outdoor showers, change them in the parking lot, since they lock the bathrooms right at 5:00 in spite of the $40 per car entrance fee, and drive into town to La Parmigiana, a small Italian restaurant where we feast on mussels, linguine and penne a la vodka, amid families who bring their nannies to dinner and who will return to their $50,000 per month summer rentals. After dinner, if Oban and I have consumed an adequate amount of wine, we walk over to the candy shop on Jobs Lane where an exhausted Jack and Liam invariably melt down while trying to choose between overpriced gummy worms or fun-dips. When it gets dark, we put the boys, still smelling of sun screen and gritty on their scalps, their ankles, in their shorts, and in between their toes, into their pajamas – again, in the parking lot, for the drive back to my parents’ house. Jack and Liam always manage to keep their eyes open until we get there. It is one of our very favorite ways to spend a day.

Every summer, we also make at least one family pilgrimage from Long Island into Brooklyn, mostly to remind us of what unsophisticated hillbillies we’ve really become. In August we drove into the city to have lunch with Elena, Kenly and her boyfriend Mike at Kenly and Mike’s chic little apartment in an urban garden setting straight out of Dwell Magazine. We could have thrown a rock at Michelle William’s brownstone and actually happened to walk right by her and her adorable toddler, Matilda Ledger, while we were walking back to Kenly’s apartment from a shamelessly hip ice-cream shop. Needless to say, it is not my great-grandmother’s Brooklyn, but it sure is a friendly place to roam around with kids.

By the afternoon, Jack and Liam were getting antsy and Kenly suggested going for a swim at a nearby community pool. We drove a few blocks to Red Hook, which, with its abandoned factories, industrial warehouses and concrete playgrounds, certainly looked different than Prospect Park or Boerum Hill. We walked by a few New York City cops stationed outside the pool, climbed up the cement stairs to the pool’s entrance in front of an institutional brick building, where a rather imposing looking woman informed us that we would need to remove all our clothes before entering and lock our bags in our car since we were only allowed to wear flip-flops, swimsuits and towels. Stripped down to our Calypso bikinis (purchased during a good sale at the shop in Southampton), Elena, Kenly and I were separated from the men and boys and directed down a dark hallway and a long gymnasium to the showers.

“Here comes our Silkwood moment,” Elena accurately predicted before we were instructed to shake out our towels by the shower “attendants” who then watched us shower in shockingly cold, stinging water in order to determine if we had adequately decontaminated ourselves before heading to the the pool area. When we finally entered the sea of humanity, a massive pool ringed by at least twelve life guards and a handful of police officers, I spotted Jack and Liam coming out of the men’s door with blue lips, shaking in their towels, followed by their Brooklyn Queen dad in his pink floral Tommy Bahama swim trunks. Apparently, we do Brooklyn Hamptons style.

We laid our towels down in a narrow, unoccupied strip of sidewalk, where Kenly and Mike lounged comfortably in their urban setting, while the rest of us searched for a space between bodies wide enough to enter the pool. The uniform 3 1/2 foot depth of the pool was just an inch or two too deep for the boys to reach the bottom without inhaling water, and it was nearly impossible to find an available space on the side wall on which to cling so we swam with Jack and Liam through the swarms of excited children out to the pyramid structure that sits in the middle of the pool. The amount of chlorine wafting from the water was staggering, yet we agreed completely warranted in light of the number of swimmie-diapered toddlers being pulled around it.

After about an hour, we left the Red Hook pool, shivering and hungry, and walked three humbling blocks wearing only our swimsuits, Oban barefoot since he hadn’t brought flip-flops, past long rows of taco vendors back to our parked cars.

Crossing back over to the yuppier side of town, we ate a mouthwatering meal at a loud Thai restaurant. We meandered around Brooklyn in the warm evening, Jack and Liam contentedly perched on top of Oban and Mike’s shoulders while licking Italian ices. Driving home that night , we turned around a bend on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and were stunned by a vision of the dinner plate full moon hovering above the twinkling Brooklyn Bridge with its luminous waterfall installation flowing beneath it.

Jack and Liam didn’t fall asleep the whole way home.