We’re inching – INCHING, I tell you! – toward summer here, which means I have to put on my thinking cap to keep us all happy, healthy, and (frankly) entertained during the months to come. And by us I mean Jude. While I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of being a summer cruise director, I do think it’s important to have a wee bit of structure to our languid days in the sun. I love all the free time that the schoolyear brings me as a mom, but I do not like the routine of getting up at the crack of dawn to get Jude ready to head out the door. I missed those lazy mornings watching cartoons in the big bed and not having to rush out the door first thing. So what’s our goal this summer? A half and half balance: scheduled activities every few weeks such as summer camps for Jude, but balanced with plenty of unplanned mornings and afternoons at the pool.

Here’s what I’m looking at for summer:

We close on the house at Carlton Landing in only 13 days (YAY!) and then we’re planning on getting everything moved down that following weekend – Memorial Day.  Sitting down with the calendar, we’ve also marked off  as much time as possible this summer for us to get away and enjoy that fabulous little community. My friend Erin snapped this photo above through the window the other day. The floors are stained and appliances are going in! The light fixtures are arriving and we’re making final decisions on ceiling fans.

The Great May Clean Out

One of the challenges from the Apprentice study I did at church this past year was to pick a few soul-training exercises to focus on for the summer. Soul training exercises are threefold: inward (things like media fasts, deaccumulation, learning how to have margin in your life, etc), outward (practice hospitality, praying for the success of your competitors, live without gossip, etc.), and upward (praying, silence, counting your blessings, etc.). So for the month of May, I’m focusing on deaccumulation. I’ve already cleaned out three bags full (haha) of clothes that I don’t wear/need/fit in (UGH) as well as two giant bags of underwear (thanks to my mom’s awesome birthday gift haha). Up next is our overflowing coat closet, as well as the spare bedroom. But the spare bedroom will get a major cleanout once we move stuff like the bed,etc. to CL. I then plan on expanding Pencil Shavings stuff into there to give us a little more space in the shipping room.  Clutter stresses me out, and I want to live with stuff that is intentional. I could write a whole post on that at a later date. Stay tuned.

When I asked Jude what he wanted to do for summer, he said he wanted to eat 500 snow cones. Now that seemed a bit overly ambitious and teeth-decaying to me (lest we forget the $3000 dental bill from last year), so I dialed it back to only 100 snow cones this summer. We started on Sunday night a little ahead of the gun, but oh well. Will you join us on Instagram with the hashtag #100snoconesofsummer? I’d love to have some friends along for the ride.

Now it’s your turn – tell me what you’ve got on the books for summer! Or maybe more importantly, what you plan on doing to relax.