On being excited about summer

And some honesty about how far I've let things go this school year

Jun 02, 2025

If you have read my post about what 2020 was like for me, it may not surprise you to know that I still have a bit of PTSD as summer approaches. In truth, ever since my kids were in any kind of structured activity during the school year (which we’ve been doing since our oldest two were 2 and 3, so over a decade), transitioning from May into the summer has been a challenge. I lean toward rigidity. Some might call it structure, but for me, it can go too far. I like things to be the same every day. This is impossible with children, but my brain still wants it. And so every summer my brain gets a big jolt of reality and I’ve mostly always hated it.

Then came 2020, the longest and worst summer ever, and things got even worse. My husband recently brought up his fond memories of watching a bunch of movies with the kids that summer, and I truly don’t remember any of it. I was apparently dissociated from reality. Things have gotten better since then, but summers with a toddler are exhausting in a different way. The first time we tried to take Noah to the beach, he would run into the ocean with no fear. Absolutely no hesitation whatsoever. He required man-on-man defense the entire time.

*A very adorable 15-month old who tried to drown himself numerous times in the summer of 2021*

The pool wasn’t much better, because even though he didn’t want to jump into the pool, there was always the fear that he would fall in. And before he was about 3, even if he had some kind of flotation device, he couldn’t maneuver himself around the pool and of course required constant supervision.

But now it is 2025. Our youngest is five years old. He can swim across a pool on his own. The other three are all extremely proficient swimmers. Everyone has a healthy fear of the ocean. Some supervision is still required, but it’s must less strenuous in the past. They play with each other, they play with friends, and they don’t need me to be in the pool with them at all times.

Things are different at home, too. Everyone sleeps through the night. Everyone can get dressed and go to the bathroom without help. Everyone knows how to use the remote to turn on Netflix and pick a show. No one needs supervision. What this means is that we can have slow mornings, where I have time to read my Bible and drink my coffee. We can have lazy evenings, where we all have the attention span to watch a whole movie together. We can go to the pool and I might be able to read a book. Outings don’t require us to bring fourteen bags of diapers and swimming gear. It just feels easier.

And so, for the first time maybe ever since I have had kids, I am really and truly excited about the summer. And I’m excited that I’m excited.

In May 2024, one of Christian’s closest friends passed away. That seemed to mark the beginning of a whole year of hard. This led to us falling into habits and rhythms that aren’t necessarily things I love. Here is an example of what a typical school morning has looked like, which I am sharing while knowing you may judge me super hard for letting things get this insane.

6:00 a.m.
I wake up and wake Stephen up (because he shares a room with Cohen and Cohen doesn’t have to get up yet). I make breakfast for Stephen and pack lunches for the other kids, if they’re taking lunch to school. Sometimes I start prepping breakfast, if I am making something like pancakes.

6:28 a.m.

Stephen and I leave and go pick up a girl in our neighborhood, and I drive them to the shuttle that takes them to their school.

6:42 a.m.

I get back home and either finish making breakfast/packing lunches, or sometimes I might have a few minutes to do some NYT games on my phone. Noah wakes up on his own and turns on the TV upstairs in the bonus room. Sometimes Zoe also wakes up.

7:00 a.m.

I wake up Zoe if she’s not awake; Cohen wakes up with his alarm and starts getting ready. I finish making breakfast. I take Noah’s breakfast up to him. Zoe eats on the couch downstairs and watches a show. Cohen waits for me to make him his smoothie and I finish packing his lunch.

7:25 a.m.

I start asking Zoe if she remembered socks, and she didn’t, and now she wants her hair done, and I go up to get her socks and come back down and then realize Noah also doesn’t have socks on.

7:35 a.m.

I start panicking and yelling for everyone to come get their shoes on.

7:38 a.m.

I get Zoe and Noah to school just on time, then come back home and wait for 10 minutes until Cohen is ready for school.

8:05 a.m.

I finally arrive home to a house with no children. I have been awake and either on my feet or driving for two solid hours.

Now, if I was a life coach (I am not), and I came to me and asked, “Do you know why I want to pull out my hair at 8 am every morning?” The answer feels pretty obvious. And here’s the thing: It’s not because my kids are terrible. It’s because I made choices that made things really hard for me, and I didn’t try to change anything all school year. Here’s some low-hanging fruit:

Why are your boys not making their own breakfast?
Why isn’t your 8th grader packing his own lunch?
Why are you letting your two younger kids watch TV in two separate rooms on different floors of their house and acting like you’re a servant at Downton Abbey?
Why are you the one running around looking for their socks?

These are all extremely valid questions, and ones I’ve asked myself at 7:18 a.m on more than one morning. But here’s the thing:

When you have been in survival mode for months, and when your brain is very tired, and when you know any change is going to elicit push-back, and you just don’t think you can handle it, especially at 7:00 a.m.—sometimes you just keep doing the same things even though you know they’re not ideal.

But now, as I write this, it is the last day of school. I’m done with the morning marathon for now, and I am determined that the summer will be different. And I want to be able to use the summer as a reset—not just so that we can do things differently when school starts, but also to help change some ruts we’ve all fallen into (EXCESSIVE SCREEN TIME ANYONE).

I am really grateful to have a husband who is on the same page as me about how we want to parent our kids. We believe we are raising adults, not kids, and we want to set them up for success when they leave our house. In that spirit, we sat down and discussed what we want the summer to look like in terms of changing habits, resetting some unhelpful rhythms, and having FUN.

As we look ahead to the summer, I also have my eyes a few months ahead on when school will start in August. Last year, I walked in to 9th grade/8th grade/2nd grade/Pre-K + marching band with complete naivete. Now I have a better idea of how it will be, and I am hoping to work this summer to make things easier for everyone in the fall (including me! It’s OK for moms to try to make things easier for themselves!).

Here are some of our plans for the summer, which you are welcome to steal if you find them helpful.

Daily rhythms

Every day, we want everyone in our family to “check off” the following boxes:

Exercise / moving your body
Reading
Household tasks
Music practice

We also want to have dinner as a family at the table as often as possible, which will be much more often than we could during the school year.

Screen time

I listened to a really helpful podcast episode that helped inform some of our decisions about how to handle screen time this summer: How to Lazy Genius Kids’ Screen Time.

First of all, we are not setting time limits on screens.

I know, I KNOW. But you know what happens if you set time limits on screens? Somebody has to be The Timekeeper. And the someone is me. And I’m not doing that anymore.

Instead, we are going to go by the maxim that not all screen time is created equal. Some screen time is OK almost all the time, like following along with drawing videos on YouTube, or practicing drums to music, or practicing Spanish on Duolingo.

Other screen time is similar to what we call “sometimes food” in our house, in that it’s not going to be an option all the time. At any given time of day, it will either be a time when that kind of screen time is available or it is not. It may not be the same time every day. It might not be at the same time for every kid every day. Some days it might be 30 minutes. Some days it might be longer.

There will be things (like the daily rhythms) that need to be accomplished before this kind of screen time is available. But they’re not earning it, and I’m not watching the clock. We’re also going to stop the habit of eating breakfast in front of the TV. I do not want that to happen during the school year, so we’re going to work on it in the summer when I’m not also trying to get four people to school on time.

Teaching skills

Another thing we want to do this summer is teach the kids some new life skills. This includes some of what I’ve already mentioned, like music practice on the kids’ respective instruments (tuba, guitar, drums, piano). But I also want to go into the fall with the big boys making their own breakfasts and anyone who wants to take a lunch either packing it alone or packing it with help the night before. These are really hard things to teach with any level of patience at 7:12 a.m. And so we will work on it this summer. (Side note: We taught our older boys to unload the dishwasher during the summer about 10 years ago. It was horrific and painful ,but by the end of the summer, they had mastered it, and I have unloaded the dishwasher only a handful of times since then.)

One other set of skills I want to work on is household cleaning tasks. All the kids have room to grow in this area, and I am ready to pass off some basic household tasks to them. I may go back to doing these things when school starts, but I still want the kids to learn how to do them.

Fun stuff

In addition to some “big” fun things we’ve got going on — Vacation Bible School, swim lessons, Boy Scout Camp, church camp, the beach, band camp, and a mountain trip to see friends — we want to incorporate fun on ordinary days. We are not an outdoorsy family. Our favorite thing to do as a family is to watch movies together. We haven’t settled yet on what exactly we’re going to watch, but I think this might be the summer when Noah is introduced to the best book/movie character of all time.

Chelsey’s personal plans

In thinking about the summer, I also asked myself what would make this summer fun for me, which is a question we as parents are allowed to ask. The way I am wired, I need some time away from all people for part of the day. My plan is to set a boundary from 7 - 8 am every morning that is my time to read my Bible and drink my coffee. I also hope that when the kids are having their junk food screen time at another time of day, I can do something I enjoy like reading, cross stitching, or sewing.

I also made a Summer Learning Plan to improve my writing, read more deeply, and learn more about some aspects of biblical theology. And by plan I mean a 10-week syllabus (aided by ChatGPT) in which I’m going to work through multiple books and writing exercises. I basically made myself a summer school course, and I don’t care how big of a dork you think I am. (If any of you fellow dorks want to see my homemade syllabus, let me know).

In closing

If you are not a parent or a dork or a fan of Lord of the Rings, this post may have fallen flat. That’s OK. You may not even be in a season of life that triggers any kind of change when summer comes. Maybe you are a perfect parent who has always made the right decisions (if so, please contact me so I can ask you for advice). But if you, too, are looking at your life or your family’s life and wanting to make some changes, maybe this summer is your opportunity. Start small. Give yourself permission to take care of what you need as well as what the other people in your home need. Tweak things if you need to. Wake up each morning and know that it’s a new day. Remember that there is so much grace for regrets about how things have been in the past, and there is so much grace to try to make changes. I’ll be trying to do that right along with you.

I leave you with this song that just came out, by one of my favorite songwriters.