By Natasha Hayden
July 10, 2014
Here’s what my summer looks like. My preschooler’s first year of school ended on an early day in June. That same day, we left on a five-day camping trip. The week we were back, we celebrated three extended family birthdays and Father’s Day as well as the beginning of the soccer World Cup (When you grow up in Brazil, soccer gets in your blood.). The next weekend, we celebrated another family birthday, and the weekend after that, I had a Taekwondo event I couldn’t miss and several other events I did miss due to the impossibility of being two places at once. This past weekend, we celebrated the Fourth of July, on which we had an extended family garage sale, and a wedding. The summer is already halfway over.
Next week is the fair. The week after that, my husband will be at Momentum, a youth conference, so I will have the kids all to myself. Incidentally, Vacation Bible School is that week. The next week, we will be going on yet another camping trip, this time with my husband’s family. The week after that, I will be taking the kids by myself (because my husband can’t take three weeks in a row off work…obviously) out of state to visit my parents who are themselves going to be briefly visiting the United States from Brazil, where they live as missionaries. When we finally make it home for good, school starts again.
In all this craziness, we have tried to find time to go swimming, take care of our garden which will soon be exploding with more produce than I could reasonably prepare in a normal (read: non-summer) week, search out garage sales, pick strawberries, and do other outdoor activities we can’t do during the 10 months school is in session, noting also that the majority of those months (particularly this last winter), any outdoor activities that don’t involve snow are closed for the “season.”
Let’s rethink this whole summer thing. (more…)
