I hit my winter threshold this morning at 8:16am. Even though we didn't have our weekly winter storm this past week, I am officially finished with cold weather. It was a chilly 15 degrees at the bus stop this morning. Packing for school has become an excessivly long daily ritual since the kids take all their winter outerwear (boots, snowpants, hat, and gloves) to play in the snow at recess. I think it is wonderful that they are allowed/encouraged to play in the snow, but when you multiply all those individual pieces of outerwear and bag times 3 kids, that is an additional 21 items to track before 8am. I've been doing a pretty decent job of outerwear containment after school, but there always seems to be at least one something that we can't locate without an exhaustive search. I guess I shouldn't complain too much, though, I saw it was only going to be -11 in Minneapolis today.
Instead of dwelling on the cold weather and months of snow cover, I have turned my thoughts to summer. Depending on the number of snow days we end up having, we will have about 10 or 11 weeks of summer vacation after school ends. For the sake of discussion, let's figure 75 days of full-time togetherness. There are weekends in there. But still, lots and lots and lots of together time. Definitely too many days to just play at the house and visit the local parks if I want to maintain any kind of semblance of sanity by summer's end. It seems crazy to me that I am doing summer vacation planning in February, but I learned last year that February/early March is summer planning season, just like October is when I have to remember to look for sleds.
Last February, I went to a local summer camp fair to see what kinds of opportunities there were in the area. I plan on attending this fair again in a couple of weeks. But, this year I'll be mentally prepared. The fair was really overwhelming last year. I had no idea just how many options there are out there. There are a LOT of summer camps available to send children; there were no less than 100 camps with booths at the fair. There's a huge range in price and an even larger range of topics: science, horseback riding, art, every kind of sport, girl scouts, sailing, swimming, nature, Indians, etc., etc. To further compound things, most of the camps had multiple options for activities. I found the number of choices almost paralyzing. Too many choices!!! Fortunately, I have realized that it really doesn't matter what I pick, the kids will enjoy almost any type of diversion, as long as I pick something that doesn't require a long drive, gets them moving around, and involves non-siblings.
Last summer we settled on a field hockey morning camp for Abby, and a week of a local Township's garden camp for Abby and Caroline, and the library's Science in the Summer program. Lesson learned from last summer: Do not send girls to camp together if they will be in the same group. While convenient from driving perspective, they need a break from each other.
This summer, Abby is begging to go to overnight scout camp, which I think I am going to let her give a try. They have a mini-program that is only 2 nights away from home, which is probably the right amount of time for a first overnight summer camp. The girls are also asking to take gymnastics. I was considering starting piano lessons. Abby wants to try horse-back riding. Caroline wants to do artwork And then there is just regular outdoor camp. What about sports camps? This wouldn't be nearly as hard if I wanted to send them to 10 weeks of camps, but I'm only looking for 1 or 2 weeks per child. Ugh. I'm back to where I started. Too many choices!!
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