Chillin in the shade

Our deck faces the West, so we get absolutely no sun in the mornings, but full sun from about 1pm until 8 pm. This has been an issue this year because the kids are ready to play outside when they wake up from their naps at 3pm (by the way I finally have them ALL napping at the same time every day for about 2 hours...I will write more about how I accomplished this feat in another post soon) but it is like the Sahara dessert on our deck. I refuse to put sunscreen on them every afternoon because it is so greasy and a pain to keep re-applying but we needed to do something so that the boys didn't develop skin cancer before kindergarten. We went back and forth about an awning, both retractable and non-retractable and there are a lot of pros and cons to both. We finally decided on an 11 foot cantilever umbrella from Costco. We went to buy it from our local Costco and couldn't find it even though it was on display the week earlier, so I went up to the costumer service desk to find out if they were expecting another shipment of umbrellas. The lady behind the desk started looking the umbrella up on her computer and said that she couldn't find any umbrellas in inventory at all. Just then another employee walked by and said "you spelled umbrella wrong...it's u-m not u-n". Then my lady said "U-b????" and the other lady said "No, u-m" My lady said "Where does the "n" go?". The other lady said "I'll just look it up for you...and she found it." Not a former spelling bee winner there!!! We had to drive to another Costco to find one in stock, but we are thrilled with it so far. It covers most of the deck at the peak usage time of 3 pm and can fold down so that our view from the inside isn't obstructed. I am still a little worried about how it will perform once the summer sun gets higher in the sky and the shadows that the umbrella cast get smaller, but we can always return the umbrella if it doesn't work out. For now we have full usage of our deck all day long, so we are all excited!