Summer

It's summer time and the livin' is easy!  Actually, it really is.  I'm feeling so much more relaxed without school to worry about. 

Although nothing on the list is earth shattering, I thought I'd share our plans for the summer.  I am not spontaneous; so, in order to give the girls a fun summer I've done a lot of planning for activities.  I don't want to schedule every moment of every day, but I do want to do at least one "fun" thing each day.

A few weeks ago the girls and I made a list of 15 fun things we wanted to do this summer.  I kept that list to things I knew we would be able to do and we made a gaudy poster to check off our list as we do them.  It includes:
- Going to our local splash pad
- Having a picnic
- Swimming
- Doing a big Lego project
- Going to the Children's Museum
- Swimming Lessons
- Crafts
- Going Camping
- Going roller skating
- A board game day
- Going to the movies
- Playing on our slip and slide
- Making ice cream sundaes
- Going to the library
- Having a water balloon fight

A few of the things that didn't make our list but hopefully we'll do are:
- open gym at our local gymnastics school
- bowling
- story time or activities at some of our local books stores
- possibly a short summer camp
- going to a somewhat local "cavern"
- a drive through zoo a few hours from here

They are also both scheduled for some sort of VBS with our church.

Although we won't officially be doing "school" I have some things I'd like to do throughout the summer.  I have a fruit of the spirit devotion and a book of verses for Pumpkin to color and Mooky to do as copy work.  I'm also hoping to make time for Mooky to read aloud to me every day and I plan on doing a ton of reading aloud to them.  I "pinned" this great blog post with books and coordinating crafts.  We'll be doing a few of those as well as some of my own.  I also have a growing list of books I definitely want to get from the library this summer.  It's a compilation from different homeschool curricula and "every child must read these books" lists I've found on the Internet.

One goal I've set for Mooky is to learn to ride her bike without training wheels by the end of the summer.  Considering that I have no intentions of going outside in the blazing heat to work with her on that, it might be a tad difficult.  However, I've been trying to get dinner on earlier so we have the hour between dinner and bedtime, when it is still light out but the sun isn't overhead, to go outside.  We'll see how that turns out.

Other than that I hope to catch up on some daily Bible reading and get everything ready for our next school year.  I'm hoping some serious advance preparation will make the day to day a little easier next year.