Summer Planning

I just finished my two weeks of fancy-schmancy, uber-expensive antibiotics and I would like to give them a standing O. After months of feeling crappy, suddenly I'm normal again. (Well, at least normal in that neck of the woods.) As someone whose life is a convoluted syndrome of complicated circumstances, I marvel when a simple solution works. I feel better. Drinks and leftover Easter eggs for everyone!

This is a month where most of what happens is preparation for other months. I'm doing activity research for the girls and trying to decide if/when we might go camping or otherwise travel, or just have the kids at activities, camps, preschool/daycare. Because by this summer I'll be back working more than I have been this winter, so I need dedicated blocks of time where my office is quiet. I could attempt to save money by working when they are home with me, but historically that's been dicey. Picture two girls running with scissors and wielding markers while I hide book manuscripts and page proof. Yeah, it was just like that, plus muddy fingerprints on the ctrl+alt+del buttons of my keyboard.

Thus far I've got Big A signed up for a week of art classes and another week of theater camp this summer. Big A also wants a week at horse camp, but I am leery. In theory she loves horses -- but her experience mostly involves waving at fields of them from the car, or clutching a shiny pink bejeweled neck of one on a carousel. With real animals, Big A tends towards skittish. She's fine at the zoo, where moats and barriers keep creatures away. But should a dog amble up and say hello to her on the bike path? Cue hysterics. So putting down a nonrefundable fee for horsie week is something I'm on the fence about.

Speaking of fences, today a new one gets installed at my house. It replaces a 50-year-old dilapidated trellis. While I adore the elderly couple who lives on that side of the yard, I did not love that they got to stare at my bathing-suited backside every time I took the kids in our pool last year. I'm soooo excited about the new privacy fence. We are also installing a more secure gate to keep the pool area separated from the rest of the backyard. We jerryrigged a system of homemade gates and fences that worked fine last year, but a couple weeks ago I saw the girls merrily scaling the old pool gate. Oh how they grow. So now my efforts to keep unsupervised kids out of the pool must grow as well.

Anyone else out there making summer plans now?