Signs That Summer Vacation Is A Little Too Long

1. You think that ice cream is an appropriate breakfast because it contains milk. And strawberry ice cream counts as fruit too!
2. You stop asking the kids not to fight and start asking them not to fight on the couch because blood stains don't come out.
3. You're on a first name basis with the people at the McDonald's drive thru.
4. The people at the McDonald's Drive thru aren't on a first name basis with you.
5. Spraying the kids outside with the hose has replaced giving them a bath.
6. You've finished buying all of the back to school supplies a month before school actually starts.
7. You start a petition for the school year to start in July.
8. You have bought 29 pairs of goggles and only have 2 kids that use them.
9. There are 5 buckets filled with dirt, sand, grass, weeds, seeds, shells, sand dollars, rocks and other collections on the deck, but not a single bucket available to take to the beach.
10. Your body goes into involuntary convulsions at the when you hear the first syllable of the word "boring"

Things To Do This Summer

If you're like me you're really dreading looking forward to spending summer vacation with your kids. Isn't it great that you can choose to sign them up for an expensive summer camp and spend their entire college savings doing so? Of course there are lots of known free or cheap things to do with kids. There are parks, grandparents, libraries, aunts, uncles and lots of other relatives that they can visit. But here are a few more ideas that are free this summer.

Kids bowl free, 2 games per day! Just sign up here in advance. Hopefully they have a place near you. The closest one to me is about 15 minutes away. Not too bad.

Barnes & Noble has a summer reading club. Go here and print out the form. Kids have to read 8 books and then they get to choose a fee book at the store, from select titles of course.

Regal Movie Theaters are having their Free Family Festival. Here is the website to find a theater near you.

AMC has $1 Movies. Not free, but not bad either.

Hope that helps with some summer ideas. I also recommend a mojito once a day to help survive summer vacation. That's for the mom, not the kid.

I'm back!

Did anyone miss me? My family and I went to Seaside, OR for 2 nights. We just got back last night.

I haven't been to the beach (the real ocean beach at least) since I moved from NJ. So it must have been at least 3 years now.

As a little girl, my family went to the beach every summer with my grandparents. I loved it! Then I entered the tween years and hated going to the beach with my family. Then when I was a teenager, I loved going to the beach again because I was old enough to do things without my family. As a parent, I now know how important it is to build memories with your kids before they become tweens. It won't be long before the kids decide they don't want to be around their parents.

We didn't go to the beach this summer for a few reasons. First, we really didn't have any extra money. I took the kids on a trip to Detroit to visit my sister and then to VA to visit my parents and other sister. Then my husband had a long business trip to India. So between the 2 trips, we didn't have that much vacation time left. And the other big factor was that both of those trips used a lot of our vacation money! There just wasn't much leftover to spend on a trip to the beach. My husband got a promotion at work and a bonus with it, so we used some of the money to squeeze in a trip to the beach at the very end of summer (Summer isn't officially over yet!). And I'm so glad we did.

The trip was a lot of fun. We played in the sand, walked in the water, went to the arcade, ate junk food, watched the sunset over the ocean, swam in the pool and went for lots of long walks. Most importantly, we spent time together as a family enjoying each other's company. There were no chores to do, no homework to get done, no phone calls to make. It was 3 days of time dedicated just to being together. Of course there were a few moments when the kids would fight or whine, but luckily none of those lasted too long.

It was a good trip, but it's still good to be home.

Summer Vacation?

Today was the first Monday of summer "vacation." It's really only a vacation for the kids, not for the moms (or dads) who have to take care of them all summer. So it's not really fair to call it summer vacation is it?

Should I write about how my kids started new swimming lessons today? One kid puked in the pool. I'm a natural puker. If I see puke or smell it, I'll puke. Luckily I didn't join the poor kid as a fellow puker. But I did have a few moms who were offering to get me a chair, fast!

No, the swimming lessons and chasing my kids around all day would take too long to write and I'm exhausted after today! You'd think that all this chasing them around would be great exercise, but somehow I managed to gain a few pounds recently. That doesn't seem fair. All this work and that's what happens?!?!

So I decided to write a funny story that my friend told me today. She has a boy and a girl who are 11 months apart. They used to take baths together when they were very little. But at age 3, the little girl started to notice the differences between boys and girls. One day her little brother stood up in the bathtub. The little girl looked at the boy and was confused. She pointed to him and asked her mom, "is that his tail?" Ever since then the kids have been taking separate baths.