How I'm Planning my Summer with Kids • Whitney English

Here’s how the past few weeks have gone down at our house: tons of school activities, programs, and year-end activities; responsibilities to handle at our home and lake house; travel for me to the Dream Big Workshop, and preparing for two major photoshoots surrounding all the summer content I’m getting ready to talk about.

In short, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t stopped to plan our summer! We have our vacation time lined out and loosely set aside. And we know that we want to be intentional about creating memories with our kids in this particular season. And, we (and by “we”, I mean David, my husband, and I), know that in order to make this happen, it takes some planning. We want this summer with our kids to be full of engaging, educational, fun activities but it can be exhausting.

So at the end of the whirlwind that culminated yesterday on Memorial Day, I finally sat down to give some thought to how this summer with kids is going to go.

First of all, and SO importantly, I know I need everyone on board.
This means COMMUNICATION. Time for individual and family meetings. I like meeting with each of my kids individually because it helps me understand best how to motivate each one of them.

Secondly, make a list of objectives.
For me, this isn’t just a summer bucket list, although some of that lands here. I have some other goals as well. I don’t want our kids to suffer from the “summer slide”. I do want our kids to enjoy summer reading as much as I did when I was a kid. I do want us to make some good memories. And I do want to plan this out. (We actually have one child who NEEDS a plan outlined more than anyone I’ve ever met, and the plan is absolutely necessary for a peaceful summer for this child!)

Next, bucket list time.
I’ve briefly polled the kids asking them what they want to do this summer, and I’ll be honest: it’s pretty outlandish, expensive, smelly, and gross. As a parent, I’m taking all their requests into account, and I’m grateful for a husband and daddy who isn’t afraid of the smelly gross stuff.

From here, I work on moving things to a calendar. I used these handy calendar printables to draft everything out and then transferred everything to my Day Designer planner.