Thursday, July 21, 2016

Summer's Start

Back in the spring, it feels o-so-long-ago now, Bitty was in that musical production at school and just absolutely was at her height of happy.  The people who run the drama at our elementary school are a part of the Theater School for Youth at the UofU.  You know, these days I believe they call it Youth Theater at the U, but back when I attended (in the very same place with some of the very same directors) it was Theater School for Youth. Anyway, our school director is also now the director there and she and her assistant really encouraged me to get Bitty signed up for their summer preteen session.  Couple of problems - it was starting the Monday after school got out (sudden!), and it conflicted with our upcoming trip to visit my brother in Seattle, AND....it's really quite expensive.  I don't know, maybe it's just typical for what summer camps cost, certainly it's less than many, but we don't really do summer camps.  I crossed my fingers and applied for a scholarship.

Hooray! Bitty was given a partial scholarship to the camp, which runs for the first three weeks of summer. We had to do some rearranging of our trip but that didn't turn out to be a big deal.  And it happened!  The days were long for her - she didn't have a single day of summer before classes started and went for 6 1/2 hours a day.




I'm going to keep it real and say that this was not too shabby of a way to start summer - you know how it goes, every summer the first weeks are beyond challenging as the kids try to adjust to being together all day again.  (They don't seem to try very hard.) There is a LOT of fighting.  Maybe that's just at my house and no one else has that problem ever.  But having one child happily engaged in something that fills her cup-o-joy to the brim every single day for almost a month?  Yes, ma'am, that's alright by me.

In the meantime, I had to keep the other two busy!

It felt like I packed an entire summer's worth of activities into those three weeks.

Of course we pulled out the pool:



Skippidy and her darling friend had a day at the zoo:



While she was gone, Cap and I snuck off to see Captain America again:


And the list went on.  The zoo. The Aquarium. The trampoline park...















It was a whiz-bang start to the summer and I felt proud of myself for getting things going with so much fun.  And then I remembered.  Bitty wasn't there for any of it.  And she was going to want to do all those things too.  So, here's to doing it all over again.

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