I suppose it’s best to start with that. It is after all, summer time in California.
In the past summers, the girls would continue on with classes and camps for a most of the day. In the period where Sam was in year-round school and Jamie was on a traditional schedule — their schedules didn’t match up. It got too complicated to juggle them around, and the easiest was to just keep them in camps and school. They were learning and they were busy. Done and done!
Eventually, we moved homes, and Sam moved to a traditional calendar school. Suddenly, summer lined up, but Jamie wanted to stay in her school with her friends (they would have splash day every Friday and pizza), and Sam and I thought we would try out different camps for her around town. It all worked out and the ladies (big and little) were happy.
By Fall 2016, it was my husband who complained — he’d finally gotten the bill for all the camps. Wooops.
I’m surprised he didn’t pop a vein. Or maybe he did.
And to his point, summer is supposed to be a time for the kids to relax, chill and get bored. My problem he said, is that I always have them doing something (why…. yes. I didn’t understand.) They have to learn to do nothing (it took me a while to process that, but…. ok).
So for the summer of 2017, we said goodbye to week-after-week of camp, and just picked one half day camp both girls wanted to do in the same location. It was the happy compromise between doing “something” and doing “nothing”. The husband was happy, the girls were a little less “on schedule”… but guess what. It meant more for me to do!
Hence, #mymommyologysummercamp was born. Trust me, I had no idea what I was doing.
We went around the house for the most part and unearthed gifts, activities and toys they hadn’t touched over the school year and popped them open.
The was definitely some Lego. And game boards!
Somehow, we got some geography lessons in with Little Passports.
And some science in with our Tinker Crates (more on that next time).
Of course, I had to inject some Filipino lessons here and there. Hearing the girls read the words is painful and hilarious at the same time, but hey, a little progress here and there should be good?
One of our milestones last year was Sam finally learning how to bike (we had to get the gross-motor skills going too), and I’d like to think that was my personal favorite moment. We’d been waiting for dad to get out and teach her to do it, since that is not part of my parenting skill set. But anyway, we got it done (pat self on back)!
Last year was the first time we purposely didn’t schedule anything on Fridays. So the girls and I ventured out into different places around town and did our version of #fieldtripfriday! We’ll save those discoveries for some later dates.
By the time I got the girls back into school last fall, I was EXHAUSTED. It seemed to work its charm on the girls though because they said that they liked that summer “best” and “would love a repeat next year (eeeeek). Strangely enough, I find that they remembered most of what we did in those sporadic trips here and there. Maybe my husband was onto something about “doing nothing”…. ? 😉
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