Start of Summer Break

The past couple of weeks I have been anticipating summer break and quite frankly have been pretty concerned that Noah doesn't seem to be making the wonderful childhood memories of summer that I made. Perhaps he is and I am just being paranoid about him missing out. I was given quite a bit more freedom when I was his age and would spend all day away from home exploring my neighborhood. My brother I and were best friends with our next door neighbors and we would find amazing little kingdoms in the woods and give them names. We thought we found some Indian burial grounds once, but looking back I am sure it was just some big dirt mounds. We would walk in the streams for what seemed like miles (I'm sure it wasn't that far though) and find perfect swimming holes. We would explore vacant lots next to grocery stores where once we discovered a huge water pipe that we all climbed through to see what was on the other side. Actually...we all started to climb through, but my friend and I freaked out after a little ways and had to crawl backwards to get out.

I am not saying that I want Noah to go crawl through a water pipe, or get lost in the woods, but those memories are among my fondest and as parents don't we want them to have fond memories? So this year I gave him a sandcastle bucket full of summer time goodies to start the summer off. Inside was a frisbee, sidewalk chalk, goggles, sunglasses, chap stick (he has really dry lips and doesn't like using my chap stick), a squirt gun, a glow in the dark mini-sword and some little candies. While dinner was cooking he decided to break out the chalk and create some art on the driveway.

He turned that blue square thing into the eye of a face, which was pretty cool. Here is another medium for his drawing - sidewalk chalk! I've seen some pretty amazing stuff done with sidewalk chalk.

Hope begged and begged to be able to go out with Noah but she isn't allowed unless a grown-up is with her so I told her I would go out with her for a few minutes.

The drew mazes around ants and what's funny is the ants actually acted like they were stuck for a while. They both got a kick out of that and Hope even narrated for her ant. Something like: Oh no! I don't know which way to go! And other silly things.

After a few minutes it was Hope's bed time and I told Noah that his bed time was going to be later this summer so he could stay out longer. After a while he went to play night games with some friends around the corner and came back all excited because he made a new friend.

Seems like this summer is off to a good start, now if we can just keep the ball rolling.