on the agenda

This happened last year too.  The end of the school year seemed like a prolonged tsunami of music programs and special events with Mother's Day thrown in there somewhere and teacher gifts to cook up and help lads execute. We may have collectively been recovering from illness then, too. I can't remember.

So here we are a week into our summer. With no snow days to make up, the school year ended on the early side.

The early side is when these lads are still waking up, even though they're on summer vacation. This way they can have breakfast with their daddy, who has laid aside his morning school bus driver duties for the next two months.

I might be one to while away the hours in a lovely haze of crafting, coffee, writing, and piano-playing if left to my own devices, but seeing as how those times are not the norm in this season of family life I take a different approach to the "lazy" (ha!) days of summer.

a full day.  The symbols next to the agenda items are meant to be clocks.

Reams of unstructured time might work well for some families -- maybe even ours eventually (there's that word again), but for the time being we need a little more structure. The elder lad has been drafting "agendas" for us each morning (I think the main draw is the dry erase marker he gets to use). It's a loose framework for the day so we all know what's coming next and what we need to accomplish. It's subject to revision (ahem) and refinement.

Items that make the agenda are, for the most part, fairly broad.  "Cook" refers to preparations for dinner (in which I am trying to involve the elder lad most days -- we call it "cooking camp"), the whipping up of snackies, or a baking project.  "Art" could be crayons and paper, paint, beads, clay, or something else.  "Play" and "clean" are wonderfully vague.  In the past week I've encouraged the bambini to play outside as much as possible before the temperatures hit triple digits.  Picnic lunches have been the norm.  "Wii," on the other hand, means playing the Wii video game system.   Time spent playing Wii must not be greater than time spent reading.  Or something like that.

Our days don't always elapse according to the agenda.  There weren't enough nappers (or "nodders," as I like to call them) here today.  We did get to go have some happy family fun time, however, but there was no more Wii when we got home from the festivities.  Last Friday the day's agenda was drafted the night before, only to be happily upended by an impromptu trip to pick berries with Grandmare. 

Around here we go one day at a time.  Making a plan for the day is one way I'm finding to help make the most of these salad days, knowing that nothing is etched in stone and that every day is a gift from God.  When I take proactive measures like these, I'm better able to revel in the gift.  I may be ready for some downtime at day's end, but I can do so knowing that we didn't just pass time.