Not Planning Our Summer

My social media feeds are filled with posts about how to schedule summer for your kids and what to put on the summer bucket list and how much fun it is to sit down with the calendar and the schedule for the local library...

None of that is happening at my house. I don't plan summer activities beyond making sure everyone has a swim suit that fits and there's some sunscreen on hand.  Unless we're using the time share, we don't even schedule our real vacations much beyond knowing which days my husband has off from work. I pick up a fresh set of AAA Travel Guides and we decide which direction to head on the highway.

So I'm not planning out summer for the kids, not even a week in advance. Maybe this is a homeschooling thing -- this is the chunk of the year where I'm not supposed to have to keep track of everything. We do what we do. Last summer, that meant bowling and/or playing in the river pretty much every day.

There's this fantastic program, Kids Bowl Free, that gives kids eighteen and under two free games per day at the local bowling alley. If we're going out for the day, we stop to bowl. (Our local bowling alley isn't on the site this year, maybe because they're charging a dollar for shoe rental and not following the official rules? It's still a phenomenal deal.)

I haven't checked out the swimming hole yet to see how fast the water is running and how cold it is. Over the course of the next few weeks, it'll slow down and warm up. Or the weather will get hot and we won't care. By September, it'll be like this again...

Don't get me wrong -- my kids do lots of things. They just don't rely on me to coordinate them all. I'll be swinging by the Dollar Tree on a regular basis to get balloons for paper mache and to the craft store for hot glue sticks.  Those aren't summer things, those are just life with a pack of creative kids.