The Summer Buffer

This year summer is not crammed full of activities we want to do before school starts.

No seeking the perfict back to school outfit or fighting over the school supplies they want vs.. the ones they need, vs. what the school list tells me I have to provide.

We are not packing in multiple weekend trips or trying our hardest to capture happy family/childhood memories before the offspring heads off for another grueling year of standardized testing, peer pressure and hectic schedules.

Nope. None of that this summer.

THIS year summer has been dedicated to allowing my kids to be kids.

That's right. I am letting them be just kids.

They have been allowed to stay up and watch the Olympics because they have taken a huge interest in the competitions this year. They sleep in as a result (which in this house is about 7:30 am).

If the girls want to play Barbies all day- that's okay. Owen spent the entire morning just today playing with nothing but a roll of scotch tape, paper and safety scissors- creating his little heart out!

So you are probably asking yourself what my point is... and it is nothing more than the idea that my kids have turned back into the kind of children I think they should be at this point in their lives!

Since agreeing to home school them, my daughters play with toys again- even the baby dolls have come back and are played with daily. They have started wearing hair bows again, they are getting along much better and they fight me WAY less than they used to and the emotional melt downs have all but disappeared.

Now that the stress of the traditional school setting is out of the way, they are beginning to re-blossom into the shining little personalities that had been lost. I feel like I have gotten my children back- which is great, but it is sad to know how drastically they changed in the few years that they were in school.

I am really looking forward to everything that home schooling has to offer! So far we have already seen huge benefits for our kids and I am sure there are many more to come!