There has been a lot of change in my life lately. Good change. Bad change. But in the end, all-for-the-best kind of change.
I have given up some commitments. I have gained new encouraging commitments. I am learning to say no. I am soaking up summer. I am forgoing events that are enough to tip the scale in the direction of too busy.
Sometimes that means missing a girls’ getaway, sometimes a friend’s birthday party. I am allowing the house to go an extra day before major cleaning, a challenge with my Type A personality. I am pardoning the pile of laundry that duplicates on the daily. We are eating sugar on a “school night” (summer camp nights in this season). We are taking an extra road trip or two, spending many hours in the car and residing in cramped quarters, immersed in family time. We are watching more movies and doing less school work, perhaps not the best of my ideas. We are spending endless hours outdoors. We are playing in the rain, and in the mud. We are catching fireflies and chasing butterflies. We are eating watermelon at every event and playing in the water every chance we get.
We are spending our summer hitting the reset button.
I am hitting reset on my personal life, rearranging my priorities to allow more of me at home with more of them at home. While saying no to more obligations is still very much a work in progress, I am making strides in the right direction, enabling us to have more lazy mornings and longer weekends. We are hitting reset on the kids’ lives too. We haven’t worried about academics and routines all summer, though we still encourage reading. Now that we have raced past the half-way point of summer, we will restart some basic math facts and gradually work more of a routine back into our schedules as we inch toward the first day of school.
But first, we will watch an extra cartoon, swim an extra lap, and spend an extra hour past bedtime riding scooters.
Soon we will shop for a new backpack and fill it with fresh new supplies, a telltale sign the beginning of the next school year is just around the corner. But before the long days become shorter and the autumn leaves show their colors, we will spend the remainder of this season hitting the reset button. Maximizing each day of summer. Indulging in every ice cream opportunity that arises. So that come fall, we can start fresh.
