Mommy Moment – The Summer That Never Was…

I’m really finding it hard to believe that summer is nearly over and that we’ll be starting our first official homeschool year in less than two weeks. I feel like we never really got to have a summer this year. We didn’t go to the beach, we didn’t travel with Tornado Dad to any of his conferences, we didn’t visit any amusement parks. In early July, I was really ill and it pretty much took me out of commission for a little over a week. Up until the last week or so, our weather was ridiculously hot with stifling humidity. Nearly every day it was 90+ degrees, and we had 11 days where it was over 100. Tornado Boy and I both have incredibly fair skin, so being outdoors was really not much of an option except for early in the morning for most of the summer.

Tornado Dad works at a small office. About three weeks ago, the other top level employee suffered a massive stroke in the office. He is recovering, but his absence has taken a toll at work, so we haven’t seen all that much of Tornado Dad of late. One major change that this has caused is that I haven’t been doing the bedtime routine with Tornado Boy. This is the little bit of time that they get to share each day, so instead of alternating, my husband does the read/rock/lights out routine most nights.

It feels very strange to say that I haven’t been reading to my son much at all. We are working on independent reading during the day, and Tornado Dad is doing the reading at night. I haven’t been participating in Natalie’s reading meme because I really can’t do much of a review on books that I haven’t read or heard. Tornado Boy has been enjoying a lot of book and CD combos from the library on his own each day. He’s also just starting to read some chapter books on his own. He’s had the capability for quite a while, but he has been somewhat resistant to it. We know that he’s having some visual tracking issues, but the crux of the problem really seemed to lie more his being unwilling to tackle a longer book with fewer pictures. He did read Arthur and the Crunch Cereal Contest on his own and we’ve picked up Nate the Great for him to read next.

One good thing about the change in nightly duties is that Tornado Dad tends to be a bit more creative than I am at times and tonight he had TB acting out the story while he read Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct. I wouldn’t have thought to do that, so the change there was quite positive.

I also had some technology struggles this summer. In the past month I’ve gotten a new computer and a new phone. Both came with some pretty substantial learning curves. I love them both, but transferring and adjusting has taken some serious time. I now have 12 years worth of photographs on my computer. I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to do some archiving! I also upgraded some software in the transition, so that’s taken some time to get used to as well. The phone is incredible. LOVE it. Tornado Boy is having fun with it, too. The educational applications for the Droid phones seem to be pretty limited, but we’ve found a few fun ones and are looking forward to finding more in the future.

Tornado Boy still seemed to enjoy himself this summer. He spent a lot of weeks attending partial day camp sessions at several different places. This was the first time that we had been able to do that (his previous preschool was year round), so I wanted him to be able to sample several themes. The sports camp that he did the first week and the science camp the last seemed to be the favorites. We did some play dates and hung out a lot at the park. We attended a couple of weddings. We learned a lot together. I can look back through the blog and see that we did things, but I feel somewhat guilty that we didn’t spend mass amounts of time being lazy and swimming. I’m really looking forward to a temperate, productive and fun fall!