Summertime and the living's easy

Tonight is the last night of summer vacay 2014. Tomorrow we return to alarms, school, schedules, and all of this & that. It is enough to make a #mommaintheburbs take inventory. I had some stuff I wanted to accomplish this summer. I was probably ambitious, a little too much so. Especially as we started off this summer with a newborn addition to our family. Ambitions, as in my "patio school." A thirty to forty minute period of time when we would retreat to the screened in patio and...learn. Learn what you ask? Geography...grandpa covered that lesson. I followed up a couple times with our Melissa and Doug world map write-a-mat. Numbers...we made it through a fourth of a workbook and involved the 3 old, barely. Arts and the sciences. When I finally realized that academic retention wasn't the focus, and a more field work philosophy was our best bet, we started making considerable headway in our education. 

Summer swim team took up most of our mornings. Weekly and bi-weekly afternoon trips to the Children's Museum, Space and Rocket Center, parks, and neighborhood pool were some of the other highlights. 

I recall an afternoon of errands followed by 31 flavors (Baskin Robbins.) A park excursion followed by Sonic Happy Hour. An oil change followed by toy browsing at Walmart. A drop in to The Little Gym open house during a downpour. The zoo, Costco, Toys-R-Us, bowling, birthday parties, farmers markets, library, day camps, biking, and croquet. The seemingly simple, but when the addition of an infant is factored, these events seem momentous. Perhaps even, ambitious!?! Or not, there are refugee families making their way out of war torn countries as I type.

In contrast, we topped off the summer with a trip to the beach. Alligator farm, dolphin cruise, seafood scarf, and National Naval Aviation Museum. We returned back home only four days prior to the beginning of the new school year. I prepped by having the supplies and clothing already purchased. Today we lunched at Panda Express as per our 7 year old-2nd grade bound boy decided, and went on a hunt for a Salad Shooter. My circa 2000 model didn't make it in our last move, and our garden is yielding zucchini's so I had promised my boys homemade zucchini bread. Apparently Salad Shooters are a hard-to-come-by-commodity nowadays. We struck out at both Walmart and Target, in between getting our school bound boy a haircut. Oh yeah, we also grew a garden this summer. Ambitious? Perhaps even, momentous? Not when compared to the families eking out survival in Gaza, the Middle East, South America, Africa, inner and rural cities in the United States and other such under-privileged, or havoc wreaked communities. Yet the contrast doesn't make our time less significant, it just makes my perspective a bit more positive. Summertime, and the living's easy. Indeed.