Ooops I Did It Again

Man!  So the plan was to take a week off from the blog after the fun-filled-frenzy that was the end of the school year and then jump back in recording our summer.  I don't know if you noticed, but today is July 1st.  WHAAAT?!  Well.  Looks like I took a month off.  But, not for lack of things going on around here.  We've had a great first 1/3 of summer vacation and pretty quickly got into a groove.  This is the first summer when I've found a schedule that seems to work for everyone.  I think it helps that Merrill has a year of school under her belt and was used to a schedule.  For right now we have an acceptable balance between free play and structured activities.  I found that a tough balance to strike though -- too much free play time and they either 1) start fighting or 2) don't want to leave play time to do anything structured at all; too much structured time and all of a sudden they forget how to entertain themselves and are constantly looking to me to provide them with something to do.  Neither of those turn out well.  BUT, like I said, for now it seems like we've struck a good balance for everyone.  Not that there aren't moments.  There are plenty of moments.  And you moms know what I mean when I say 'moments'.  The kids have all participated in one session of swim lessons and will do one more starting next week and the girls are taking gymnastics and continuing with their piano lessons, but for the bulk of the time we are home.  We're gearing up for Merrill's 6th birthday next week as well as for the arrival of a new niece or nephew (any day now) and trying to soak in lots more summer fun before it's all over.  My goal is to do some back-posting in the next couple of days to (ahem) make it LOOK like I didn't skip all of June and to get back on track with recording our days.  Mostly because I know in a year, two years, 10 years, I'm going to look back and wonder what the heck we did and why it's not on the blog ;).

A gratuitous picture of the kids thrown in just for fun -- Millie rocked those 'glasses' for about the first 2 weeks of summer vacation.  She seems to be over the trend now though.