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Summertime blues

By Tara Zandra | July 5, 2016

I’ve been enjoying being productive with the girls in regards to lessons. We spend so much time during the fall and spring months going to classes, celebrating holidays, and going on trips, that we don’t always get a lot of traditional lesson work done. Since their outside academic classes ended at the end of May, we’ve been working really hard- though we still took time out for a quick trip.

But tonight it hit me that my girls aren’t really having a “summer” experience. Do they need to? Probably not. We do so much fun stuff all the time and have never limited ourselves to summer before. But when Tabitha was very young, she went to day camps every single summer. From about age 3 through 11. Then dance took over our lives including summer and Daisy never wanted to be dropped off at camps anyway, so summer was just hot and me lamenting still having to go to dance and desperately trying to squeeze some form of lessons in.

While I still hold tons of bitterness over the way dance ended, I would be lying if I didn’t say the gift of time hasn’t made me extremely happy. We’re playing games as a family, taking more quick trips, planning more future trips- and frankly, I am much more relaxed and happy with all this time. Only at night do I wallow in the rage of what one person did to my girls’ lives with one phone call.

But now I’m wishing Daisy was going to a day camp and that we were doing “summer” things. I don’t know why, I guess because I need to find and create a problem for myself so I can solve it? I like puzzles :) I did research splash parks and found that 3 have opened near me in the last 2 years. Of course, we’re in the middle of the worst drought ever so they may not be on all the time, but I figure it’s worth it to try since they are so close. We should go to the beach, but that is such a hassle that it’s hard for me to enjoy it. Instead I’m just inviting ourselves over to people’s houses with pools. We really need to go to the beach though.

Zoos seem like a good summer activity. We have two nearby- the large Los Angeles Zoo and then a smaller Santa Ana Zoo. Maybe the aquarium too, that seems like a summer thing. There’s Disneyland, of course, but it is amazing how crowded it is nowadays. Not always enjoyable, that’s for sure.

Not sure I figured anything out here, more thinking is probably in my future- hopefully not while I’m trying to sleep.

Topics: Life |

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