I’m really excited for preschool to be out for my daughter at the end of the week, in fact, I’m more excited than she is.  The end of a school term brings back memories of all the freedom of being out of the classroom.  In my family, it meant travel, everywhere.  For us, it is a lot more local.  Nevertheless,  we will have fun and hopefully create great memories.  I can’t remember very much about the summer my daughter was born, or even the year after that.  It is a fog in my mind I can’t access.  I started to really enjoy being a mom as she got older, and those memories are there.  Every so often in the daily grind, little by little, I learn so much from my little girl.  Now she is five, I’m enjoying her company more than ever.

This summer will involve a lot of driving to and from my daughter’s activities.  Two days of summer camp, karate class twice a week, and ice skating at least once a week.  My child is an active little tornado.  It is not much different from our daily list of things to do, the only thing new is summer camp instead of preschool.  Somehow, just because it is summer, it feels a lot more like freedom.  Kindergarten will start in September, so I feel like we have our last frolic before real school sets in.

We need to spend some time at the beach this summer.  Part of summer camp has swimming lessons.  I’m ardently hoping this helps my daughter allay her fears of having water on her face.  She has quite an intense fear of getting her face wet.  Bath time involves many dry washcloths to keep her face as dry as possible before panic sets in.  Last summer, the swimming lessons seemed to help a little, so hopefully another round will help her find freedom from this fear. The irony is that she absolutely loves the ocean and learning all about it.

I have a goal over the summer to document all the things we do in words, photos, and videos.  One day when my daughter is all grown up, I want to show her what we did the summer before she started her journey into the big world.