Summer plans
How is May madness? What are you planning for summer?
We’ll move to a fortnightly schedule for Week-in-the Life features over the summer, but this week, I’d love to hear (via reply or in the comments below) what you’re planning for summer.
What is your work situation?
What’s your childcare situation?
Work and childcare
I’ve finished the teaching term (hooray) and will spend the summer at home in Scotland rather than travelling to campus. But summer is when academics try to get all their writing done so I’ve got a big summer worklist that I’ve started chipping away at.
I was listening to the Best of Both Worlds Podcast and feeling grateful that my singleton’s summer planning doesn’t require a multi-tabbed spreadsheet and driving schedule. But it did require some planning, as my son (nearly 6) has 7 weeks off. We have a home exchange in Southern Europe for two weeks, and son will go to day camp while I work, before we head to my parents for a week. Home for a week (with camp booked) and then a beach trip with the cousins, (British beach so it could be cold and rainy), home to houseguests and 6th birthday celebrations (Viking themed…who knows?!) and then school starts. It’s our first non-daycare summer so I feel a bit uncertain about how it will feel/go, but hopefully there’s some fun stuff for all of us.
What are you looking forward to?
Exploring a new city with my son. We’ve got grand plans for farmer’s market dinners, reading piles of books, and will try and eat as many flavours of ice cream as we can. I’m away so much much October to April, that it feels nice to get intensive time with him, and give my husband a break. He also seems super keen to work on his reading over the summer so I’ve printed out the Everyday Reading poster and we plan to fill it in.
What are you dreading?
Sunscreen application. Is there anything worse?
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May truly is mad for us. We've had a field trip, grandparents' day, teacher appreciation week, math carnival, and weekday morning receptions for 2 kids; this past weekend alone we had school spring carnival Friday night; cub scout picnic, block party, friend's brithday party on Saturday afternoon-evening, and daughter's birthday party on Sunday. But we made it through with some lessons learned for next year and ended on such a high note with a successful birthday party.
For the summer, kids are out of school for 10 weeks. We've got a rising HS freshman babysitting at our house 2 days a week, grandparent care at their house 2 days a week, and my husband will be on point for Fridays (typically light for him.) Fridays will be for trips to the local amusment park and indoor trampoline park (we have memberships to both), our nighborhood pool, etc. The girls have one week of half day gymnastics camp in June and one week of full day STEAM camp in July. We've got a long weekend trip planned for July and a week long beach trip in August. I've got two government holidays over the summer.
I would like to be able to take some more time off to have a random day at home with the kids, but I carefully parcel out my vacation to cover Spring Break, a summer trip, Thanksgiving, Christmas break, and the odd teacher work day, so I don't really have any PTO to spare this summer.
This made me laugh, because I felt exactly the same way about being glad we don't need multi-tabbed spreadsheets to organize our summer! We still have plenty going on, but not to that level, thankfully! :)