How will your kids spend the summer?

My 3 year old’s daycare is year round so nothing will change
for my 3 months old, we plan to take him to see his grandparents in IL

My kids and I will probably spend the bulk of the summer hanging out at the local pool with myself, Gimmedat and her kids. The rest of the time they will be playing foursquare, football, baseball, and rollerblading, biking, scooting, and skateboarding with the neighborhood kids.

This is all very different from when I was a child and my summer days consisted of The Price is Right at 10:00, Bonanza at 11:00, followed by Love American Style at noon, Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched back to back at 1:00 all leading into the afternoon movie at 3:00. Good times I tell you, good times.

When I was growing up, my parents sent me to a ton of camps as well. A lot of local ones, places I could walk to. I remember this one was at a nearby park. We did arts & crafts, played… I also did sports camps, cheerleading, gymnastics. Whatever my interests were, my parents tried to send me away to it lol.
I never thought about it, as a child, but now that I have a child…I can’t imagine what it’ll be like, taking care of a child and working full time! yikes!

My son is young, so this summer we’ll do what we normally do. Museums, zoo, parks.. I’ll be in school, and working more, but we’ll still do a lot.

@daloon Zoo camp and overnight camp are redundant.

My daughter will be very, very busy. She will probably run summer track and will also make All-Stars in kickball. She is going to a church camp in New Mexico in June, and will be a counselor-in-training at another camp for six weeks in July and August. Then in August she will go to soccer “camp” at school. She will have to figure out how to do some community service during the summer (a requirement of the program she is in at high school). That will probably be to volunteer at a hospital because she wants to go to med school, She will also have to earn some cash so she can keep her car running. In between she will hang out with her friends at the local health club playing tennis and swimming, and window shopping at the mall.

My son is bipolar and ODD and we have found through bitter experience that sleep-away camp is not an option for him. I will probably take him and his friends swimming at the local City pool once a week (it is very inexpensive) and may set aside Wednesdays to take them to the Dollar Cinema because that is half-price day. I will probably take him to the aquarium a time or two, and I have scheduled a SCUBA trip out to one of the oil rigs in the Gulf for him. He will also spend a week or so visiting his cousins. Otherwise, he will watch TV, ride his bike, IM people, go to the library down the street, do some yard work and maybe do some paid work helping me move stock, and he will fill in the rest of the time grousing at me and his dad.

@Darwin Your musings are always inspirational. Thanks, for, er, being you.

My kids will spend time with their friends (most likely in my pool) play sports, spend some time at grandma’s house helping with yard work, bike rides, and I’m sure play some video games. We will go paint pottery, maybe play tennis, who knows. We don’t have a plan.
I worked nights and my husband worked days so one of us could always be home for the kids.

@elijahsuicide Nice

Both kids will get 7 days alone at Camp Nana. My son is towards the beginning of summer, my daughter gets the end of the summer. Mid-summer, Nana goes on camp, with us. Just the three of us, we’re going to the Grove’s Park Inn for a week of different adventures. My daughter is going back to Costa Rica for another mission trip. That is right after we get back from the mountains, she’ll be gone for 3 weeks. She has a few school camps scattered in, as well – one for track, one for tennis. She has one week where she’s working a Girl Scout Camp, part of the community service hours towards her Gold Award. Oh, she wants to go to the beach, too. WHEN?

My son has 3 YMCA camps and 1 art camp. He’s so excited about the art camp. The Y camps, he’s happy about, but the art camp, he gets to paint a huge canvas. He wants to lay on it and roll in the paint. I can see that ride home! YUCK!

How to balance it all? We’re supposed to balance it? Someone lied to you!

My oldest son will hopefully find work to help pay for his student exchange to Germany in 2010. My youngest son will spend most of his time with friends playing xbox. My daughter will take ballet and tumbling classes. The rest of the time will be spent in our pool or just hanging out with mom and dad in the backyard. We always have a bonfire during the weekend and make smores. We also have our annual trip to northern Wisconsin in July. We were just discussing our trip the other day and how much we are looking forward to it.

We are on an island, so hopefully we’ll just go to the beach a lot.

Our summers are pretty unstructured. This will be the first year that my boys, 4 and 5 years old, go to a summer day camp. It’s only a week of half days in July at my youngest son’s preschool, but they are really looking forward to it.

My 10 year old usually chooses two or three week-long day camps offered by the town’s park and rec. department. They center around certain sports or themes, and I try to space them out so she also has a lot of summer “down time.”

As for filling up that down time—that’s the best part of summer! We go to the beach at least a couple of times a week. We visit local hiking trails and playgrounds, go to the Aquarium, the Peabody Natural History Museum at Yale, and this insanely overpriced dinosaur themed place with a sprinkler park (we only go once a year because the price pisses me off!). We play in the sprinkler and set up the kiddie pool in the yard, catch bugs, try to grow plants that never seem to survive, and building a little fire in the evenings to roast marshmallows.

Summer is also a good time for things like raising tadpoles, hatching some praying mantis egg cases (you can order them online) and watching caterpillars turn into butterflies. I can’t wait!! The kids are in school until late June, so we still have time to make plans and pretend like we won’t spend half the summer complaining about the heat!

My kids will be taking care of their new baby!!!

My grandson will be born in late May/early June in Paris where my son and daughter-in-law are living. It seems like only yesterday when we were looking forward to our lazy days at the township summer pool.

My younger son is quitting his job as a programmer in a few weeks and planning to take a cross-country trip of some kind.

I love having adult sons but I do so miss having them home with us and doing things on a daily basis.

@janbb – congratulations on the upcoming birth of the grandson! Very exciting for the family, I’m sure! :)

@janbb Felicitations!