Summer Fun!

I'm so excited for summer! It's finally starting to feel like the warm season will actually come this year, and the festivities are already starting. I somewhat gauge when summer has officially started based on the number of fun activities available to me. Each year I look forward to things like local festivals, going on hikes, fishing, farmers markets, and the like.

Tomorrow we're headed out to the local children's festival, which sets up loads of activity booths and performances, all geared towards little ones. The play date group will be headed there and I'm really keen to see what all is there. We've been going to a playground for play date over the last few weeks, but I've also made plans to do some more organized activities, including a nature walk and a water-fun day in our backyard, which will include painting long rolls of paper with dyed water using water guns!
For Gabe I'm going to be working on set up a bit of a 'school' routine with him. He's still a few years out from being enrolled, but I know that whatever I teach him, he'll just absorb, and he loves learning, so I figure why not feed him some knowledge now? About once a week I plan to have a "teaching" day with him, which doesn't necessarily mean he'll be sitting down in a desk for the day, but it will be a day focused on helping him learn new things. One of those days will be a travel day, where we talk about maps, what different countries and languages are, and learn how other cultures add to our lives. Then we'll have a number day, a letter day, nature days, etc. We found very early with Gabe that our teaching methods were actually too slow for him (we'd call a zebra a 'horse' and a pterodactyl a 'dinosaur', and it confused him why so many things were called the same thing - and at 18 months he was more than capable of remembering what a pterodactyl was, and saying it!) So we want to make sure we don't hold him back by not offering up enough information for him.

With the family we always have a list of things we love to do over the summer: vacation in the mountains, fishing, hiking, the local fair... I'm going to make an effort to get the boys out of the house more this summer as well. There's no reason that I can't take them to the beach once a week, or at very least a splash park. We'll also be headed to Calgary ever so often to visit the zoo with my sister and maybe the farmers market with my cousin. I think the boys will have fun with that!

We also have a couple of family reunions coming up this August (on the same weekend, actually) that we're thinking up activities for. For the kiddos, I'm thinking glow in the dark bowling (glow sticks in pop bottles!), and nature scavengers hunts, and for the big people, Matt and I are going to try to make a jumbo lawn-jenga! It was a neat idea I saw on Pinterest and have wanted to do for a while.

For myself, I've got a few projects to do - like refinishing some night stands and painting the fence, that I hope to get to sooner than later! And Matt's biggest goals this summer are to hike, fish and BBQ as much as possible! Admirable goals, if you ask me!

What are you doing this summer??

Mrs. VanderLeek ;)