Another summer of fun

A perfect summer beach day with our family.
I love how many kids there are!

I feel like I wrote this yesterday. Lamenting the loss of another summer and the return to school. And yet here we are again. I'm happy to say that so far we have NOT repeated the fighting and yelling and pushing each other away! Possibly because we've done our fair share of bickering this summer but also because I planned things a bit better. We had our Long Island trip in the beginning of August followed by fun at home and then our first real vacation as a family. We went back to the mountain that Vader and I got engaged on and spent a few days doing fun family things. They weren't perfectly behaved every single minute (well, the Princess wasn't) but they did really good and it was a lot of fun and I hope we get to do it again. Since we got home we've had nonstop fun. Our last trip to the local small amusement park, playdates with good friends, and this weekend we'll have a BBQ with some newly discovered local second cousins. This summer we've caught fireflies, gone fishing, done a lot of swimming in various places, gone to museums and playgrounds. We've had lots of family time with LightRunner's first birthday party and our trip to LI. We've truly packed it in. We had wanted to do a drive-in movie but that just wasn't in the cards this year. We also wanted to do a local hike but I discovered that they've closed it... but it's okay since we managed to do a hike while on vacation. We've managed to do all this between speech for Chewie and PT visits for me. It really was a great summer.

Will we resort to the moody yelling this weekend? Maybe. But I'm going to really try to prevent it. We've been having major battles over food--what else is new--but I'm trying to institute change slowly so we're not at war every night.

In just a week they will be back at school and we will go back to the demands of homework and projects and school lunches. Chewie will start her second year of preschool the week after. LightRunner and I will fill our time with food shopping, running, story time, and whatever else I can manage. But this week we are still enjoying summer. I'm trying to get as much laundry and crap done today so we can have one more Friday Fun Day tomorrow. Instead of lamenting the fact that it's over, I want to celebrate all the fun we had and start planning next summer.