Summer is Here. Holy! How are we going to fill all that time?

My older son’s preschool wrapped up last week with a rousing graduation ceremony a week ago Sunday.

See how proud he is to have received his completion certificate.

He is only three and he will still have two more years there but still he graduated for the year which leaves us with three months on our own to do whatever we want.

His school does have a summer camp, which many parents have told me is great. The camp only lasts for six weeks and is only two hours a day (like his class during the school year). Also like class this past year, parents can choose the number of days per week to send their child, but still when it was time to sign up, I thought the schedule was to confining so we didn’t sign up for summer camp. Cockyishly, I thought, we don’t need his school for entertainment during the summer. I am Mom–I can handle this!

But now I am a little scared that I will not be able to fill all of that time. During the school year, I used the time while he was in school for grocery shopping, cleaning up, or maybe even a little blogging. So suffice to say, I went through a bit of a panic during last few weeks that he was in school! In my panic, I binged researched a bunch of the kid activities in our area for the summer.

Here are the results of my panic research: I learned the ins and outs of multiple summer library programs, recreation association programs, vacation Bible schools, and the hours of the fountains that you can run through at the local outdoor mall. I thoroughly looked at what hikes were planned in the near future with a club that I belong to called Hike It Baby. I also looked at my calendar at the things we had planned over the next few months with friends and family during our summer travels. When I saw my friends over the past few weeks, I tried to get a feel for what their summer schedules looked like with camps and such.

The thing is, I couldn’t bring myself to sign my kids up for anything. I didn’t sign my older son up for summer school at his school. I didn’t sign up for the Summer Reading program at the library (even though I am a librarian at a public library). I didn’t make any notes in the notebook that I carry in my purse about any of the research that I did. I didn’t write anything down on our family calendar outside of the vacation plans that we already made to visit family this summer. I got a general sense of when my friends would be available this summer but I didn’t make any kind of notes or any formal plans like meeting up every Monday or anything.

I couldn’t really figure out what was going on with me. Then on last week while conducting a google search about my feelings about the ambivalence I felt toward making concrete summer plans, I found an article that perfectly summed up what I was feeling about being over-scheduled It is called: Stop Scheduling Playdates and Start Enjoying Your Children.

You see, I had been finding that sometimes during the school year, our schedule was starting to get packed too scheduled that I was forgetting to just enjoy my time with my children. If I was with other moms doing an activity with our kids, I was concentrating on socializing with the moms and I certainly wasn’t giving anyone my full attention. I would sometimes go home from these meetups feeling unfulfilled. Sometimes planned activities weren’t giving me what I needed.

So for the summer I have decided that since we have such a wide open schedule I am going to pull a Sheryl Sandberg and “Lean In” to my sons, especially to Baby Nugget who is becoming a toddler and who can walk away from me and has ideas of his own.

So this doesn’t mean that we won’t have play dates in the future. It doesn’t mean that we won’t go to pre-planned activities at the library or the park. What this does mean is though is that I am not going to fret if our calendar isn’t completely filled up. For example, It is Monday afternoon right now and besides that birthday party that we are going to on Saturday afternoon, I have yet to contact anyone about meeting up this week or make any concrete plans about activities. This is big for me. I am a person who likes a plan. But I wasn’t getting what I needed from over planning so I am trying something new.

So what are we going to do this summer?

1. We are going to playoutside. We will play in our backyard and at the park. We will take walks on the rail trail path and with Mr. Katie on trails with Baby Nugget on his back and Mr. Man walking beside us.
2. We are going to do lots of swimming at the YMCA and our local pool.
3. We are going to visit family both locally and in Western Pennsylvan
4. We will make plans with friends but not all the time.
5. We are going to stay home sometimes when it suits us.
6. We are going to read books and use our imaginations.
7. Sometimes we are going to let Baby Nugget sleep and play with playdough in the kitchen or the tiny Legos that he puts in him mouth while he is awake.
8. We are going to ride our bikes at the park.
9. We are going to go to Hike It Baby hikes when it works for us.
10. We are going to lean into eachother.

What are you going to do this summer?