Summer Overview

This summer has been, in a lot of ways, my favorite summer.  There has been an unexpected, unwelcome change in our house which I was discuss briefly in a later post.  While this posed some challenges this summer, we still had a great time.

My kids are getting bigger and I love it.  With my youngest being 2 (!) we can do a lot of fun things that are much more difficult with newborns or pregnancy.  After so many years of not sleeping through the night (7) I honestly feel like I can accomplish tons each day since my sleep has been fairly uninterrupted for almost a year now.

Erik and Lainey spent 4 weeks at St. Johns camp.  It runs from 8:30-12:00 and they love it!  They took classes ranging from baking to hair and nails to lego robots to soccer.   It's a fun camp, close to our house, and run by cream of the crop teenagers.   Erik wants to volunteer there in middle school.   I would love that!

Aside from camp, we really spent a lot of time at the pool this summer.  Carson learned the basics of swimming independently (can swim almost a lap and jumps off the diving board) and Lainey earned some freedom by getting to a level 3 swimming class (I no longer require her to stay right next to me).

Our pool complex is wonderful.  THere are four pools - 2 kiddie pools and 2 lap pools.  In order to safely take all four, I keep Kyle in a life jacket at all times.  If Carson wanted to go in the bigger pools, he needed to be by my side or wear his life jacket too.   Erik and Lainey swim well and just check in with him if they change pools.  I keep my eyes on them, but really they swim quite well.

I think we spent 4-5 days at the pool every week which was fun for everyone!

We also took small day trips - went to a Blue Crabs game, Orioles Game, toured the Naval Academy, went to the Baltimore CHildren's museum,  National Building Museum twice (once for regular admission and second time for the BEACH exhibit -fun!). 

We were supposed to visit friends in Norfolk, but I ended up getting the stomach flu that weekend.  Err!  We are hoping to reschedule this trip for sometime in the near future.

My kids only have 8 full weeks off of school so that summer flies by!  I think it's a pretty perfect length.   No time to get bored, forget less when going back to school, but still time to do fun things that are much harder to do during the school year.