I really love my job, but I will admit that occasionally summer is one of the harder times to be a full-time out-of-the-house working parent. I would love to create " camp mom", in theory anyway.  Instead my little guy continues at his daycare, and my oldest is attending a variety of camps. Still, we manage to fit a lot of fun in:
This is a park that stretches around our little cul-de-sac, and taking a ball out for 45 minutes in the evening sometimes leads to magical moments.  That's one reason I love our 25 great summer activities for kids piece. We'll be doing a lot of those: Stuff that is fun and amazing without making grown-ups want to tear their hair out. We also focus our efforts on local festivals. This one was at school for an end-of-year fundraiser. That's different from how I grew up, in some ways. My mother was mostly at home with us, and so I had weeks where I could bike to the library and call on friends...old-school Generation-X hanging out in the neighbourhood. But my father was a professor, so we also had some summers where we were able to go on long adventurous road trips. And before I actually had kids, I would have guessed we'd spend summers packing up the car for weekend trips everywhere. Instead...I'm going to come right out and say it...we find we'd rather hang out at home, where there's a chance of also getting the laundry done and we know where the next potty break is at all times. One of the biggest things I've learned about work-life balance...and maybe about balance in general...is that sometimes it really is about the simplest things. Before I had kids, I would have guessed that we would spend our summers jaunting off en famille to all kinds of adventures. Instead, right now, it's the en famille that's the adventure. We might make it to the corner store for a Popsicle. What are you up to this summer? Grand adventure, or at-home fun?