Summer imaginations

I love summer!!

I love the sun and the beautiful days. I love the Fourth of July and parades. I love vacations and the beach. I love all the yummy summer foods and picnics. I love that my kids are home and can help with chores. I love the freedom of not having to go anywhere or be any place at a certain time. I love to hang out around the house and be lazy if we want to.

One of the best things about summer time though, is that my kids can just hang out and be bored. This is the reason that I don't put my kids in any activities over the summer. They need this time to be bored so that they can learn to entertain themselves. When we were little, my siblings and I would play all day long together. Our two favorite things to play were "school" and "office". My dad had built little desks for each of us and we would line them up and down the hall way and one of us would be the teacher. We'd make up assignments for each other and grade papers, etc. It was a lot of fun. For "office," half the fun was getting our desks and phones set up. We would take up the whole living room and get out all sorts of things. We would be there for hours playing. Sometimes, it would even be set up for days if we were really into it. I can't remember what we did to pass the time, but I do remember how much fun it was. We also played Barbies for hours and built our own furniture out of tissue boxes and scraps of material. We would build forts in our living room out of blankets and would play under there for days. To accomodate my brother, we would play out in our back yard as spies and spy on the ladies doing aerobics at the church that was behind our house. I always had such a good time playing with my brother and sisters. We have some great memories together.

Now that I get to be the mom, I get such a kick out of watching my kids all playing together. They like to play "restaurant", "hotel", and their most recent one is "animal clinic". For hotel, Bella and Paige had actually packed their little suitcases with some clothes and books to make it more authentic. I love how they all work together to make it fun. For animal clinic, they bring out a lot of their stuffed animals and the "customers" bring their animals to the clinic and they wrap up broken legs, give them baths, walk them and brush them. Maggie always seems to be the receptionist for whichever game they are playing because she likes to use the phone/computer. :) They've made forts out of blankets and they play outside together alot too, but I love it when they use their imaginations to play. During school, they just don't have time to play these things, so that's one of the things that I love about summer.