So long Summer!
School starts around here in just about a week, and all the parents here are saying “Praise the Lord in heaven, it’s hotter than hades and we are sick of these kiddos!” We swam with some friends this morning and I think all the moms were hanging on by a thread. I will say, my kids have been so well behaved this summer, they are more helpful around the house, they’re respectful, funny, and I am enjoying this season with them a lot, but it is also so. many. hours. together. If the weather were better I think this would feel more manageable. I’m friends with people who live in these delightful climates where they are literally outside with their kids all day long in the summer. If we aren’t submerged in water that is absolutely not an option here. We are definitely not meeting at parks, going for hikes, or enjoying meals outdoors right now. And as my kids approach like 5 hours of screen time in a day and the parental guilt kicks in I have to remind myself that while most of these folks are hibernating for months at a time we are hiking, patio sitting, and playground visiting from October through May, so I guess it all evens out. We hibernate in summer and every year I have to remind myself of this reality.
Exploring Wisconsin
It’s been a much slower summer around here this year, mostly because of our sweet little puppers. Usually the kids and I take off for the midwest for 2-3 weeks in July, bouncing between my sister’s in Iowa and my folks in Minneapolis, and man we love those weeks. But this year, because of Ollie we didn’t feel like we could do that long of a trip. So we have been home most of the break, with a 10 day trip to the midwest that Chuck joined us for 4 days of. The boys and I flew to Minneapolis to spend 3 nights with my folks, helping them get organized for our family vacation, and then we drove with them across the entire state of Wisconsin to Door County, which is a peninsula of land that sticks out into Lake Michigan. We had a VRBO right on Lake Michigan and my sister’s family drove over to join us for 7 days. Chuck flew in and out of Green Bay, WI for 4 of those days, and then the boys and I helped my folks drive back home after our week at the lake was over before flying back to Florida. Otherwise we have been home, which has been fine, but definitely has made the time off school feel a little longer than usual.
Our trip was lovely, far more mellow than it feels like many of our vacations are! Often we are pretty scheduled with a long list of things we want to do and see, and this particular week we went into without any plans or agenda. Each evening we just said “what sounds fun tomorrow?” and went with that. We did some hiking, exploring small towns, took a ferry to Washington Island where we spent time in gorgeous lavender fields, and saw some stunning beaches, and had plenty of time to read, play some games, and watch the 4 kids participate in the Nutso Olympics that Megan and Nathan created for them. When we do rental homes, my amazing mom does almost all the cooking ahead of time and brings meals frozen, ready to go so we don’t have to spend hardly any time worrying about food prep while we’re there. We do spaghetti, meatloaf, chili, grilled burgers, baked sliders, enchiladas, and other easy meals that can easily pop into an oven or a pot to reheat/defrost. Feeding ten people isn’t a small task and we are so thankful for all the work she did ahead of time!
Here are a few photos of our midwest adventure—the weather was gorgeous for us most of the time!
Other Summer Happenings
The kids have done a couple camps this summer, just half day camps here in town, and the 3 of us all participated in Kids Kamp at church (VBS). Asher did two weeks of technology related camps and Aidan did two different weeks of a basketball shooting guard camp where he was the free throw champion one week (went 9 for 10 from the line in the finals!). He played in a summer basketball league where they competed every week against other local teams and had a blast with that program, he learned so much and improved greatly in his skills. He’ll play in their fall league starting in a couple weeks to gear up for the school basketball season. Aidan served as a preschool crew leader for VBS and loved his week with his little group of 3 and 4 year olds. Asher was a camper for the second to last time, and has been making huge strides in his piano playing this summer. He’s also still doing karate, and has discovered he kinds of likes the grappling/wrestling part of it much more than the punching and kicking.
We’ve been filling the rest of our days with beach trips several evenings a week with Ollie (he doesn’t like the water at all, and tolerates the sand, but loves getting to run!), working with a puppy trainer, meeting friends at various pools and trampoline parks, and we made it a goal as a family to try one new to us ice cream shop each week this summer.
In years past I’ve tried making the boys read for a certain number of minutes a day, but for various reasons this was hard to enforce. So this year I tried something different. I told them they each had the goal of reading 8 novels during their 10 week break. They had to be books new to them, not graphic novels, and not so below their grade level they blow through them (I’m looking at you Wimpy Kid books…). I said that they were in charge of pacing themselves, so I wasn’t setting time limits each day, but they had to be making consistent progress in books each week or they wouldn’t get screen time on the weekends. I wanted them to work on building their reading for fun muscles this summer, being willing to try new books and pick up another one when they finish one. I told them that at the end of the summer anyone who had read their 8 books would get to join me for a special celebratory literary dinner at a place that I would not tell them (they spent all summer trying to guess where it is, and finally, just last night Aidan figured it out. We are going to The Melting Pot to celebrate their book-ish success this summer, which they will both love!). It’s been amazing how well this has worked. Asher (my natural reader) has blown through SO many new books this summer. He’s my natural reader but so likely to just re-read Wings of Fire or something he’s read before, and I really wanted to push him into new titles. It totally worked. He’s read the first 5 Percy Jackson books, he read a gorgeous fantasy novel called Impossible Creatures, he has read two books called The Candymakers and Candymakers part 2, each of which are about 500 pages about kids in a worldwide baking competition where things go awry. He read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (oh yeah and the two of us finished the final Harry Potter book this summer which we read aloud). He says he’s on novel number 13 of the summer, and I believe him, it’s been amazing to watch. Aidan (my more reluctant reader) just started his 8th book of the summer today, and I am so proud of him. He’s been reading a TON for him and he’s been truly enjoying it. He also read The Cursed Child, and then the rest of his books have been in this dystopian series I found for him that was advertised for fans of the Hunger Games (which he read this past year and really enjoyed). We separated the boys this summer and gave up our guest room so Aidan could have his own room, and now he’s been reading in bed at night to put himself to sleep. Yes they have had way too many hours of screen time. But it’s not uncommon for me to come in and find them both sprawled on the couches reading in the afternoon now and that’s a beautiful thing to see!
Favorite Books of the Summer
I read a few books this summer that I truly loved and thought I’d mention here in case anyone needs a new title to check out!
A Girl Called Samson by Amy Harmon. I finished this right before school ended actually and truly loved this historical fiction about the real life Deborah Samson. i didn’t know who she was but Aidan surprised me by saying “oh wasn’t she the woman who disguised herself as a man and fought in the revolutionary army?” Yes. Yes she was. She managed to convince everyone she was a man for over a year as she fought with the patriots during the American revolution. Harmon took some pretty significant liberties with Samson’s love life part of her story but otherwise the parts I looked up and researched on my own were pretty accurate. It was super engaging and a very well told story, great for any historical fiction fans!
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid—I am a huge sucker for all of her books, she’s a must-read for me whenever a new book of hers comes out, and this one didn’t disappoint for me. Set in the early 1980s NASA program this novel deals with some of the first women sent to space and life in the astronaut corps. I find her books so wonderful because I get completely immersed in whatever setting she’s writing about, and this one was no exception. I found myself googling various aspects of Houston’s NASA campus and various roles/jobs each astronaut might have onboard a shuttle mission. I blew through this one really quickly.
The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni. I finally picked this one up after a few folks told me how much they loved it and they were absolutely right. This was a gorgeous novel about Sam Hill, a boy born with ocular albinism which made his eyes appear red. Nicknamed “Devil Boy” and bullied as a child, Sam continues pursuing the extraordinary life his mother has so fervently prayed he would live. This one crosses the decades from his adulthood back and forth to his childhood memories and the cast of characters surrounding him were wonderful. I would highly recommend this extraordinary novel to just about anyone.
A Few Other Things
We watched season 5 of The Chosen this summer as a family and man, that show is so so incredible. I’ve sang it’s praises on here plenty of times, but goodness it was powerful. It ends with the kiss by Judas, and watching the shock on the disciples faces as they realize one of their own brothers is betraying Jesus was something I had literally never thought about before.
I’ve discovered Olive and June’s press on nails this summer after some not great experiences at some local nail salons and am really loving them. They legitimately last for me about 10 days and look great that whole time, plus they don’t seem to be destroying my nails the way gel manicures did! $7 at Target and about 15 minutes of time and that feels like a major win!
I did my back to school Freezer Cooking this past weekend, we had pretty much eaten our way through our freezer meals that I made back in May and I knew I wanted to restock before the busy school year started, so I ended up doing 64 meals last weekend that will take us through the end of October for sure—I did a few more fall type meals, less for the grill—even though it’s still so hot here I’m ready for the things that feel more like fall once school starts! Meals like potato soup, tortellini sausage soup, broccoli beef, shepherds pie, baked spaghetti, chicken nachos (it’s almost football season yall!!), a couple of my mom’s meatloaves, fajitas, and cranberry chicken are all ready for the crockpot or oven in my freezer and it feels like the greatest gift to myself to have taken 3 days to do all this work. Yes, it’s a lot of money at once on food—I’ll be honest and say I spent $600 on ingredients in one weekend—about $400 of that was meat and about $200 was the rest of the ingredients—lots of olive oil and produce and canned goods etc, but when I did the math at the end it’s less than $2 per person for a dinner each night, about $8.00 a dinner for a family of 4 and then often with enough for Chuck for lunch the next day. I adjust our grocery budget accordingly on the months I’m doing a huge freezer stock up and then the rest of the weeks my grocery budget really is pretty simple with breakfast, lunch, dairy and produce—since dinners are taken care of. It works for our family in this season, but I totally understand this method of cooking sounds horrible to most people I know! (And I’ve been asked, what happens if we loose power in a hurricane? We have a generator and this freezer is the very first thing Chuck hooks up for me!)
I think that’s about all that’s new around here! We are trying to stay cool, trying to train a puppy, ready for school to start and anxiously awaiting football season! I hope you are well wherever life finds you this month and I’ll see you back here next month for what we were up to in August!
