KooKooNoodle

I grew up in New York City in an apartment on the 11th floor overlooking 96th Street (that’s me at the start of my senior year of high school). We didn’t have a country house or out of town relatives that we could visit for the summer, and I never went to camp. It was up to my brother and me to entertain ourselves indoors all summer. Sure, I could roller skate around our building, jump up and down on our pogo stick, or play handball against the wall of the brick school across the street, but a 1-block radius isn’t much of a stomping ground, and going barefooted was out of the question.

But for the first time, I feel like I’m going to have a real “summer vacation.” I want a classic, barefooted, lemonade-drinking, shorts & tank tops kind of summer vacation. I probably feel this way because I’m teaching more now and summer vacation and school are two concepts permanently joined.

Chloe and I are going to Mommy and Me swim classes all summer and are going to try a toddler tumbling class at the YMCA (whoops, scratch that one, it was cancelled due to lack of enrollment, hmm). I plan to go to the beach at least once a month, and run in the sprinklers daily. We’ll have homemade ice cream, movies outside projected on the new fence, BBQ every night, fireworks on the 4th of July (totally unavoidable in my neighborhood where fireworks are legal and used to the point of pandemonium), campfire songs (I’ll have to learn some), vegetables from our garden and the farmer’s market, and lots and lots of sunscreen. Now, if only we had fireflies in Los Angeles…

Posted on June 25th, 2007 by Stephanie
Filed under: Kids, Life