Last Day of My Summer..

August 31st.

School starts for teachers tomorrow. Most of us have already been back for weeks, preparing our classrooms for the kiddies to arrive on Thursday. Our two days of professional development begin tomorrow.

It was a busy, fun and productive summer. We celebrated my grandmother’s 100th birthday, (the “real” day is actually this Thursday.) Our cousins from all over the country came to New Jersey and we celebrated for nearly three weeks! I think I wound up seeing more of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York with my Western cousins than I would have ever done had they not been here!

We took a “historic” tour of Greenwich Village, visiting the places Grammy grew up, the apartment she and my grandfather lived when they were first married, the church my grandparents were married in and another church where my father and his brothers were baptized.

We went to the beach – so incredibly close, yet for some reason, a place we hadn’t gone in over a year, and to the Poconos with a trip to Bushkill Falls. We got to see another one of our cousins play in a performance of “Rock of Ages”. We went bowling, to a trampoline park, to the zoo and to the pool. We watched a Mandala be constructed in my own home town!

All of this happened in just those three weeks! The rest of the summer, I worked at Camp Maple, where I have worked for the last seven summers, so although we were outside and having fun with our campers….it wasn’t quite “my summer” yet.

On Friday, we take DJ to college. He is one of the last of his friends to leave for school and he is ready to go.  Dave and I….maybe not quite so ready to have him leave, but we are excited for his new adventure.  That might officially end summer for me. A new batch of Kindergarten parents, leaving their babies with me as I leave my “baby” in Massachusetts. It is going to be a week filled with bittersweet tears for all of us!

Summer is Slipping By

How can tomorrow be August already?  Summer vacation goes by so quickly.  So many people think that teachers have it easy with their summers off, but many of them, me included, have to work during the summer.  Our school district pays us on a ten month scale so there is no salary coming in if I don’t work in the summer too.  I don’t make nearly as much in my summer job as I do teaching, but it is a lot less work and a great break for the summer.  It just means that there is not a lot of free time to get away.

When I was growing up, we spent the whole month of August in The Poconos.  As a kid, it was one of my favorite things about the summer.  We try to get the kids up there over the weekends in the summer, but this year was filled with baseball games on the weekends and we didn’t make it up there.  The next few weekends are filled with weddings and family commitments so I don’t foresee us getting there anytime soon.   When the kids were little, we headed down to Long Beach Island for a week for a few summers.  We don’t live far from the ocean and we need to take more advantage of that.  My big dream for when I win the lottery some day 😉 😉 is to buy a home on the ocean that I can escape to whenever I want to.

There is one more week of summer camp for me and then a brief overnight trip to Connecticut to look at a few colleges with DJ.  That’s our big “trip” for the summer this year.  Sometimes I feel guilty for not being able to provide the kids with more vacations but we still try to make the summers fun for them.  A trip to Six Flags Great Adventure with Dave, baseball games, camp for Drew, the town pool…. there isn’t a shortage of things to do but it is always nice to get away for awhile.

School doesn’t start up again until the first week of September so we will try to fill up August with a lot of fun activities.  Next year at this time, we will be packing DJ up for college around this time!!  Time really does fly by!