My Summer Learning Curve

Fortunately, we are still on summer break.  And I don't know what I would have done without these last 3 weeks.  We spent the summer doing and going and it was great!  But the last 3 weeks of just unwinding, hanging out at home, and catching up on pumpkin projects has been refreshing.

But we're now down to just a handful of days before we go back to school and I feel the sadness seeping in. As a mom, summer is a time I learn so much about my kids and myself.  Although I am a list maker, I've decided summer is not a time for lists.  I will no longer make a "bucket list" for the summer and I will no longer say, "That would be a good summer project."  When you put a list in front of me, I will not stop until it's complete.  No matter what.  The list sits there...taunting me...stealing my joy...creating expectations in my kids.  Down with the summer bucket list!

I also learned some pretty great things this summer.  Spring starts with Cooper's birthday and the summer ends with Layla's.  This means we now have a 9 year old and a 6 year old.  Like every mom out there, I'm not sure how that happened.  I have enjoyed every year of my kids' lives even more that the previous year.

Layla works in the gift of mercy.  It's amazing how God is using that in her life.  She feels things deeply and is very perceptive.  There isn't much that gets past her unnoticed.  I'm amazed at her observations of people and situations. I do not have her gifting of mercy.  I don't always understand the deep emotions and processing that go along with it.  At times, it frustrates me.  But when our lives aren't full of a hurry and the urgency of a schedule or list, I have time to understand her better.  As a result, her gifting has come to amaze me. She is mature beyond her years. She is extraordinary.

Cooper is such a...boy.  But having an older sister he adores grounds that crazy boyness in him...just a bit.  He is so rough and tough, but he has such a sweet, gentle heart.  There are times I just want to scream, "CAN YOU PLEASE SIT STILL FOR JUST ONE EVER-LOVING SECOND?!?!?!"  But I also take great joy in seeing the freedom in which he runs through this life.  It's in our down time that I get insight into his emotions.  It's when I'm in his world, riding 4 wheelers, cruising around on the golf cart, looking for night crawlers for fishing, that he'll share his deep thoughts.  There aren't many, they only come in a sentence here and a sentence there.  But they usually blow me away.  He goes through life with a happy-go-lucky attitude without paying much attention to what's happening around him.  It's in our quiet moments that I learn he feels things deeper than I think and observes more than I thought.

In a few days I will send them off to Kindergarten and 3rd grade.  After I drop them off on the first day I will go have a good cry.  Then day 2 will come and it will be a little easier.  We'll get in our routine and I will soon enjoy the freedom of moving around my day to day life by myself...no explaining every move, every conversation, every reason why or why not.

And the next time I reflect on a summer gone by I will have a 7 year old and 10 year old.