tips for parents: managing summer while staying halfway sane

I spent the first few days of summer vacation threatening to send my kids to camp.

There was so much attitude.

Is this all there is to eat? Why do we have to go to the pool? I’m hot. It’s hot. I’m hot.

There’s nothing to do.

Sound familiar?

What I realized quickly was that this attitude was just as much me as it was them.

We had a sit down. I explained to them the approach for summer we had decided to take. I called it The Freedom Approach. No camp or scheduled activities means freedom for us in our daily schedules so we can do a lot of fun things, but it also means that they have to cooperate. Freedom does not come without a cost. I’m adjusting my life to give them that freedom but I can’t, won’t do it unless there was an overall attitude of gratitude, friendliness and enthusiasm.

I think this little lecture/pep talk was for me too. And it helped. Expectations were clearly set. Isn’t that like Parenting 101? I never seem to learn.

And so with a minor attitude adjustment on both ends, we moved forward deeper into summer. Here are some of my strategies that I’m using to manage summer and maintain a little bit of sanity.

work first

I get up early and do my work first thing in the morning before our day officially begins. How early? Early. I give myself at least two to three hours in the morning to pay attention to my writing, blog and book project. No email or social media or shopping, just work. It might seem like a small amount of time, but if I can stay focused, I can bang out a lot of work in two to three uninteruppted hours. With my work out of the way, I am able to be more present during the day. The more present I am, the less frustrated I get. The less frustrated* I am, the better day we all have. Chain reactions. If you have something you want to get done, do it first. Preferably when they are not awake.

*I’ve noticed that I get the most frustrated with my kids when I am trying to accomplish something and they are nagging me, fighting with each other, being generally unhelpful.

stop checking

I’m not sure where I picked up this idea, but the premise is to only check email with the intent of replying. This has required a lot of discipline and has been the hardest to implement, because I am very used to checking my email at every lull. It has not been easy and I’m not always successful at it. But I’ve found that if I don’t respond to an email right away and am just reading messages, I spend a lot of brain space and energy composing a response in my head only to go back later and actually write the response. Very, very hard, but just being more aware has made a difference. I am feeling more efficient and present when I can stick to it.

be healthy

Fruit and veggies keep me happy. Yoga keeps me happy. Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean I can throw my good habits out the window and start buying white wine and potato chips by the case no matter how tempted I am to drown away the requests to play on the iPad. This is another chain reaction situation. If I feel healthy and energized and happy, things just go a lot more smoothly around here. To keep up my health this summer, I’ve switched my yoga schedule to nights and weekends, and every day around 11:00am I make a smoothie.

Here is my current favorite:

• almond milk
• spinach
• banana
• pineapple
• psyllium husk
• ice

ignorance is bliss

I’ve been closing my eyes every time I see something on Facebook about how spray sunscreen is bad for you. 1. I don’t want to know. 2. Is this really surprising? 3. Don’t ruin my summer by posting that garbage on Facebook.

have a plan

Kind of counterintuitive but I’ve found that more structure and planning ultimately gives us more freedom. Each week I plan out what I need to accomplish to keep my work schedule flowing. I also started planning out our activities for the week and sharing the plan with the kids. At first I was using the strategy of asking them – What do you want to do? Do you want to go here? Do you want to go there? That got us absolutely nowhere but into arguments. Now I just say, here is the plan for the week, they know exactly what to expect, and we have some sort of loose structure to our days. There’s plenty of space to linger at one thing or cut another short, but having a destination has helped a lot. This week’s schedule looks like this –

• mon: sports at the park/pool
• tues: friends over/world cup
• wed: sports at the park/pool/world cup
• thurs: free morning/movie
• fri: beach day

have an ice cream budget

Probably the most critical, being able to go out for ice cream can save an entire day, break up a fight, provide a light at the end of the tunnel, blast you with sweet smelling AC…just the kind of treat you need to have in your back pocket when you are crazy enough to take on hanging with your kids all summer.

invest in a uniform

I’m not a shorts person. I’ve never had a good relationship with my thighs, and I’m not prepared to take on that issue this summer. Last year I full-on embraced the maxi. But this summer, I was looking for something different. Something that was comfortable, washable, and neutral enough that I could wear every day but that wasn’t too clingy in the wrong places or hoochie short or striped (when will everything stop being striped?) or denim. Not sure how I came across this skirt, but it met all of my criteria and I’ve been waiting patiently for it to go on sale since May. A few weeks ago the price finally dropped, and I’ve been wearing it just about every day since. And just yesterday as I was walking home with the kids from the park for the fifth time, I got a “Hey Mommy” from a car of teenage boys. How’s that for amazing results? I’ll take it.

That’s my summer.

Just trying to have a little bit of harmony, fun, and a lot of ice cream. Parents – what’s in your summer playbook that’s keeping you halfway sane?