Now that my children are in school full time, I love summer!  It was more challenging when they were younger because summer was just plain exhausting.  Now my oldest has a job that he can ride his bike to, my two middle daughters are babysitting and doing a few local sports camps and my youngest will do a summer reading program at the library.  It’s very manageable and best part:  no homework, no driving all over the county to sporting events and no dinners on the run.  Bring it on!

Summer is a breath of fresh air for me.  Summer is when I can finally relax from all of the running I do for extra curricular activities during the school year.  I am just as happy as the kids are on the last day of school.  I get all these plans going in my head about all of the fun things we are going to do over the summer - trips to amusement parks, sign up for the summer reading program at the library, play dates with friends, trips to museums, pilgrimage to a monestary or shrine, campy crafts to make, vegetable and flower gardens to maintain,...All of these grand ideas and a whole summer to complete them.  As soon as the 4th of July rolls around, I start to panic that I have not done even half of the stuff on my list.  Then I start to go into a panic planning mode.  There are 4 weeks of summer left and 20 activities yet to do so what can I squeeze into this week.  That lasts for about a week.  Before you know it, we are buying our back to school supplies and the kids are back in schoool.  But I think that we end up doing what we really were supposed to do, even if it ends up being only 1/4th of my grand summer t0-do list.

I do have an informal summer bucket-list in my head.  We never complete it all, but it’s nice to have goals and ideas to refer to.  I would like to take my son strawberry and/or blueberry picking.  We go to the little kiddie amusement park once/summer.  There’s a restaurant on the river with a playground that we like to go to once over the summer.  We do lots of playgrounds, picnics in the park (and at home), popsicles from the ice cream truck on our front porch, library activities, splashing in mud puddles, playing the sprinkler, etc.  Weather is definitely a factor in all this.  Some of these activities are much more fun if we go on a day that isn’t terribly hot (or rainy, of course).  The main thing is that it’s important to me to have plenty of time for unstructured family activities.  Camps play only a very small part of our summer, and I hope that trend will continue as my son gets older.

For the second summer in a row now, I’ve gotten a 1/2 sized poster board and made my own June/July/August calendar.  Then I filled in every single *possible* activity that is available on each day - free summer concerts, library events, $1 morning movies, bowling events, etc.  Plus our town pool schedule.  Weather permitting, we can take our pick and be very, very busy or do only the minimum. 

I loved Rachel’s recent post about water activities (she linked to a Pinterest collection of ideas).

Frankly, I often wonder what happened to the athletic, outdoorsy, adventurous New England gal I used to be…since moving to Philly area & having kids, *everything* is such a chore & such a drive and I think about everything in terms of “will we all be totally wiped out exhausted if we do X?”  What a wet rag! :-(

(Ha! Captcha code is “try23” - 23 things, maybe?  Try acting 23 again??)

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Summer!!  I’m a teacher, can you tell??   Even when my kids were little, I loved it.  (I wasn’t working then.)  Long days in the backyard swimming in our pool filled our days.  I wouldn’t trade it for the world.  We also went to the shore every summer and still do.  I’ve been going there since I was 3.  Yes, it’s the Jersey shore, but it’s a nice family beach town. It’s Ocean Beach Unit 2,  not Seaside Heights.

I try to strike a balance. My 4 are 12, 9, 6 and 4. During the Summer (which has still not yet begun, as my kids are in school until the middle of next week) we have 2 weeks (not consecutive) of family vacations planned at a lake and the beach, and 3 weeks of half day camps for each of the older 3 children (again, each one week, not consecutive), and 2 weeks of Summer Religious Formation which we do to avoid having to go to classes once a week after school all school year. That leaves us with roughly 4 unscheduled weeks. During those weeks, we will hang in our backyard (we are lucky to have a pool), go to movies, venture to NYC or Philly (equidistant from our home), and just do other fun stuff we can think of. I am looking forward to the unstructured days, as there seems to be so much pressure during the school year with projects, homework and activities. I do miss the days of my childhood when parents did not seem to be so involved in planning Summer activities, but where we live, most moms work and kids are in camp all day every day, so there is not a lot of opportunity for self amusement with friends. The best part about summer for me (during those unscheduled weeks) is no alarm clock, we can get going when we are ready, not when the clock tells us we have to.

I think we mix it up like many of you. We have 6 children ages 14, 12, 10, 8, 8 and 5. 

I might think of 4 or 5 things I want to do (like today we went berry picking and to a nearby park for lunch), the amusement park(most of the kids earned free tickets by reading—they had to or we were not planning to go), swim of course (in the neighborhood pool), ride bikes, go on hikes, maybe go to a museum once. Some days when kids need something to do, we might organize a room and I will have them help me clean up some or do some other random chores. I can definitely tell when they need some help coming up with something to do.

We went to the beach the week of Memorial Day, which is pretty early for us. So that seems a bit odd this year—to have our vacation already over so early.

I do find that my kids like to just “play” with neighborhood friends because they don’t get to see them that much during school. They honestly spend hours just playing—which is great for me. I have noticed that my girls do a lot better at occupying themselves than my boys do.

My father worked at Raytheon. Shut down was the last two weeks of July. The four of us-Mom Dad me and my brother would brain storm on what to do for those two weeks. A given was a day at Hampton Beach, a trip to Canobie Lake. We also had alternatives for days it rained. When we were very young we traveled but as we got older, it was day trips only.
We had a pool, so my brother and I took advantage of it because winter comes very early in Massachusetts and is a short summer.
We no longer have “spring” or “autumn”.

Lroy, you must have grown up very close to me, but we usually went to Salisbury or Plum Island. I miss that area since I live in NJ now, but at least the ocean temperature is alot warmer here.
My plan is to go to the beach often, the usual playground (they have arts and crafts 4 days a week during the summer), the sprinkler park, berry peach picking.