Summer Vacation

“Vacation is what you take when you can't take what you've been taking any longer."


Summer is coming soon and the kids will be out of school in just a few weeks. I have to find something to fill their time.

I always enroll my kids in summer school. It keeps them busy and learning and helps solidify what they have learned. The school has also made sure it preps the students for the next grade. It's only a few weeks long so the kids still have plenty of time to be lazy before school starts again.

It's also a good time for them to visit family they don't normally get to visit. My mother likes to take them for a couple of weeks in the summer because we don't get to make it there often. I take them to see more family in Indiana, too.

But between travels, they are home without much to do. I have to put my kids in daycare because I can't stay home to take care of them. I try to do activities with them on the weekends, like going to the zoo on nice days or the children's museum on really hot days. We go to minor league baseball games sometimes.

The best part of summer vacation is I get some down time. We have no school activities, no scouts, no Awanas. Our evenings are free and I don't feel so stressed. While they are gone I can catch up some movies I wanted to watch, do some reading or sleep in without interruption. I also get in some exercise that I don't have the time to do while they're in school.

The worst part of the summer for me is they go to their mom's for six weeks. I try to break it up so they're not there the whole six weeks at once. They get to stay up as late as they want, snack all the time, and basically run free. When they get back from her house they are a rowdy couple of kids and I have to come down on them to get them back in line. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to get them straight.

What does summer vacation mean for your family? If your kids go off to a parent's house over the summer, how do you restore order when they make it back? What activities do you do to keep them busy?