Blessings

This is how Summer 2011 is going down:

June -We were committed to staying in town because of baseball and softball. I made the best of it by scheduling sports camps and swimming lessons during June. Which adds up to not many lazy days, but lots of fun stuff to keep the kids busy.

July - Camp... driving to and from for two weeks...preparing to teach...and staying for a week.

August - (Don't tell, but we might have our month of rest in August.)

June will definitely be the most structured month of our summer. We had to be somewhere every day in June by 10 am, but more mornings than not, it was 8 am.

So, pretty early on, I was sick of summer.

Just kidding, I wasn't sick of it, it just wasn't the abundance of free time we were all craving at the end of school.

The kids were still pretty much on a school schedule when it came to getting up in the mornings. Their habit was to wake up and park in front of the TV until I threatened to ground them for life and they would finally get up, get dressed, and make it to breakfast.

And then getting them to focus and eat breakfast was a headache. We were hardly ever on time, and I was angry every morning.

Then I remembered a link a Facebook friend shared, and it changed our mornings.

I made 3 rules:

1. I announced a set time that the TV would be turned off every morning of each week giving us enough time to get ready for our day. No TV while getting dressed or eating breakfast...not even for the ones all done and waiting for the others to finish up.

2. Each person at the breakfast table has to write something they're thankful for and stick it to the dinning room window.

3. We started off kinda' slow. The kids thought it was hard. I told them, I know... it is hard when you don't have Disney Channel to tell you what to think or how to feel. But keep practicing and you'll get better. The first day, everyone wanted to write "food", so I made the rule that there could be no thankful repeats.

We're a month or so into this little experiment, and their answers are becoming more thoughtful. Maybe it's because we're out of all of the obvious things like food, clothes, bed, water, but I like to think that maybe it's because they are becoming a little more aware of all the blessings they have.