SUMMER!!!!!!!!!

Mrs. Rose, my tenth grade English teacher, would be extremely disappointed in me for my excessive use of exclamation points in the title of this entry ("Any more than two and you just seem crazy."), but I feel it entirely necessary. I am so excited that summer is here.

We have had a really busy year. I completely overextended myself (as you can tell by lack of blog entries). I don't feel like each individual kid was overextended, but as a whole, our family was. Not every family works this way, but in this family, pretty much, if one kid has tee ball, then we all go to tee ball. If one kid has dance, we all go. That's not to say we always stay the whole time, but it does mean that everyone is loaded and unloaded from the car quite a lot. Our afternoons were overly full, and I'm happy to take a break from that.

And apparently I am taking that whole "break thing" to the extreme. The kids are signed up for almost nothing this summer. Annalise will do a week of Girl Scout camp -- the funnest, dirtiest camp ever. And Juliette will continue her MyGym class over the summer. But that's it. We plan on doing nothing but playing, exploring, swimming and going on field trips. It's totally my kind of summer. I may be totally regretting this decision in a couple weeks, but for now, it suits us just fine. The fighting has stopped. The bickering, whining, complaining, over-tired melt downs -- all of it has stopped. We are back to going to bed after nine and Zachary, for one, is sleeping in until ten almost every day. It's so lovely! Last night we took a walk to get ice cream after dinner. We are going to make a tradition out of playing at Annalise's school every Wednesday evening. I am going to have a little cooking class with Annalise and three of her friends. We'll have lots of playdates and trips to the park and beach. But we'll also have lots of days like today, where at almost 1:00, three of the four of us are still in our pajamas. To me, this is what summer is all about.