Summer Bucket List

It's almost over!  For some reason the end of summer always sneaks up on me.  It's the 4th of July and half of the summer is still ahead and then all of a sudden it's time to start buying school supplies and  our days of sleeping in are over.  So as the summer winds down, I realize that all those things I told the kids we would do this summer need to get done.  It's time to start checking items off the summer bucket list.  So far we've gone to The McKinley Museum, the McKinley Monument and the Canton Children's Garden.  All Ellie has wanted to do this summer is go swimming at Dogwood pool.  I'm cheap and don't want to pay to go to Dogwood unless we're going to spend a full day there and so far, there hasn't been a day that's been nice enough when we don't have anything planned.  Sunday looks like the day though, which is bad because I have a feeling there will be lots of people trying to squeeze one more pool day out of summer on Sunday too.  We also have Baylor Beach passes we got last fall which we've never used. Gotta get there as well.  We have sleepovers that we need to plan and playdates that need to be set, all of the things I promised we'd do back in June and never got around to actually putting into the planning stage.

Yesterday we were at the store and a woman asked the kids if they were ready to go back to school.  Caden, of course, was a quick "No Way!"  but Ellie was quiet for a minute.  I don't think it had occurred to her that it was time to start thinking about that.  She's not one of those kids that LOVES school, but she doesn't hate it either.  I was interested to hear what she had to say.  I think once the seed has been planted and she gets these back to school shoes she's been thinking about she'll start to get in the back-to-school mindset.  Caden, on the other hand, will probably never be ready to go back.  He much prefers the pace of home, where he has devices close at hand all the time.  Vince likes school, but he's not starting until the second week of September, after our vacation, which therefore is a million years away in my mind.  Olivia I think will have the hardest time with back to school. She's used to having lots of people to help her and entertain her.  When everyone leaves and it's just her and I for 2 1/2 hours each morning and then just her and Vince in the afternoon, I think she's going to be bored and she's going to miss her biggest siblings.  Vince too, will feel the void they'll leave.  And me?  I'm not one of those moms
that cries on the first day of school, but I'm not one to want to get rid of my kids either.  I miss the routine of school time, but I'll miss having my kids around so much too. And I dread getting up early in the morning again.  I'm more productive when I have to have the kids on the bus by 8:30, when I'm rolling out of bed in the summer, but with Olivia still getting up through the night, I need the flexibility of a later wake-up time.  However, with back to school comes fall, which is my favorite season.  I'm excited to see how fall comes to this yard and starting the school year in a new district. Bittersweet I guess is how you can sum up how I feel about back to school.  I'm just glad that I get the transition of still having some kids here at home with me still.  I can't imagine how odd it will be when I put Vince and Olivia on the bus too and back to school means an empty house all day (with the exception of Jack, of course).  I have a friend that sent her youngest to school a few years ago and she said she'd been the mom of little kids for so long, she wasn't sure she was ready to move to the next stage of being the mom of school aged kids.  I'm not looking forward to that either.  I'm just going to have to remember that and enjoy the time I have them at home, whether it's just for the next two weeks until they go back to school, or for the next 3 years until Olivia gets on the bus for kindergarten.  Crossing items off the Summer Bucket List will have to be not only for them, but also for me to enjoy doing these things with my kids that some day, they won't want to do with me.  After all, what high school student gets excited about going to the Beech Creek Butterfly house with their mom?