#MomLife
Summertime is always bittersweet to me. It’s exciting because school is finally over for a few months, we can relax our schedules a little, and make fun plans to do during Summer Break. But it also puts a lot of pressure on families.
Have you seen any of the Summer Bucket lists that float around about this time every year? Some of them are short quick lists. Others can have about 100 things to do on them. I feel like every year I print off one of these lists with big plans to accomplish the whole thing. But then about a week or so later I give up on it and we go back to our normal day of too much electronics time, laying around in the air conditioning and eating all day. At least that’s what my family seems to do.
This summer is a bit different than past summers because we are still in the midst of a pandemic, so many of the items on the list might be hard to accomplish. But I don’t see why we can’t try to safely complete as much as we can. We don’t have to put pressure on it. We can have fun times at home in our own backyards. We can make things up as we go. We can enjoy ourselves. We can do this.
I think this year I have a different sense of motivation to complete a summer bucket list. With the quarantine that we have all endured it has been hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything. You can feel bored and unmotivated. But this year more than anything I WANT to complete something. I want to feel like I started a project and finished it. So I’m challenging myself to find the best bucket list for us and to work hard to complete it with my children.
Now don’t think for one second that we will be the perfect Pinterest family completing the list with no hiccups. I promise you we will be a hot mess family on some of these items. There will be items that the kids just don’t want to do and we will work through those as they come. That’s the good thing about a list, they can always be altered. So don’t feel like you have to follow the list to a T. Feel free to switch it up to accommodate your family. One example of us altering the list is No. 1: going to a waterpark. Instead of going to a waterpark we chose to go swimming instead to practice social distancing. We were able to check something off our list and still had fun at the same time.
Summer Bucket Lists can be fun if they are used correctly. Don’t start putting pressure on yourself to be perfect, it’s OK to be a hot mess mom. It’s OK to take days off and just sit around in the air conditioning and play on electronics. But it’s also OK to get outside and make new memories with your family and maybe printing off a summer bucket list might be a good place to start.
Summer Break is on average 8-10 weeks long so I challenge you to Google summer bucket lists and find the best one for you. As we work through our list, I will be sharing with you some of the victories and failures we might have but no matter if we win or lose, I know we will make memories this summer and that’s really the ultimate goal.
Good luck with your summer bucket list, feel free to send me updates as you complete items on your list, I’d love some new ideas to incorporate into our fun filled summer break!
Steph Hightree is a hot mess mom who is fueled by stress and too much caffeine. She is a Three Rivers native who talks about the good, the bad, and well, everything else about parenthood.
Any views or opinions expressed in “#MomLife” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
