It's Only The First Day Of Summer Break...

And I'm already being driven completely berserk.  And the saddest part is that Petunia is still in school through Friday, so it's just the boy-bickering that I'm dealing with so far!  I need a zebra shirt to go with my basketball-coaching whistle, and stat.

There is a good reason why I don't home-school.  This is it.  We are fortunate to have a great public school around the corner, but even if we didn't I would drive them somewhere else...I just don't have the patience to be a primary at-home teacher.  I might be able to handle it for Thing One and Petunia if I absolutely had to, but Thing Two's constant arguing would land me in the funny farm within weeks.  As it is, I'm one of those evil parents who makes their kids do some schoolwork over summer break every year (Thing Two legitimately needs to so that his hard-won skills don't regress, and it would be egregiously unfair for him to be the only one!) but being with my kids 24-7 year-round would not be good for any of us.  It is what it is.

At any rate, this morning I was trying to run errands with the boys after we dropped Petunia off at school.  The third or fourth time I had to threaten mayhem due to shopping cart wars, it became blindingly clear that my refuge and sanity will lie in keeping these kids occupied all summer!  They do have some camps and clinics scheduled, and things like piano, speech and taekwondo go year-round.  We are planning a few short trips, too.  But that stuff, even combined with the pool in our yard, will only go so far.  

And more importantly, at the end of most recent summers, I've found myself wishing that I'd planned better.  That I'd made a point of looking for fun activities and then doing them with the kids so that their summer was more like a real vacation and less like the same-old, same-old routine, just without school in it.  I was thinking about this on the way home from shopping.

When I got home, I went online and did some searches for kid-friendly activities in my part of the world.  A quick search yielded a list of 15, at least half of which we've never done before.  We have about ten weeks of summer.  By the end of the summer, I plan to have done all 15 of these things with my kids, and you can hold me accountable for that.

Building family memories and keeping the kids busy at the same time...sounds like a win-win to me!