Summer

Nathan's last day of school as June 3rd and I was kind of dreading summer mostly because I wasn't sure how I was going to handle Nathan and Brady fighting all day long. And I don't really have that much planned because of some unexpected expenses(transmission on both cars died) we have to keep this summer pretty low key. Mostly I didn't want my boys just to watch TV all summer so following my sister's plan for her kids I set up a bunch of task they must complete before they can ask for any type of screen time. And so far it has been working great. Every morning they have to make sure their room and front room are clean, need to be dressed(this is a big one for Brady who would prefer to spend all day just in his underwear), breakfast and brush teeth, then they must do 30 minutes of homework and complete a chore from their list. I am actually super surprised that they never question this or argue that they don't want to do all the items. Some mornings they have everything done by 8:30 and others they spend the first few hours of the day just playing nicely together.

  Nathan was pretty excited that vacuuming was on his list and happily vacuumed all of the front rooms.

 We do try and get out of the house every once in awhile, luckily I have a friend with a pool. She is always begging me to just dropped by anytime and use it so last week I took her up on the offer and the boys really loved playing at the pool.

 We had this Gold Rush panning kit laying around our house last week so when the boys got bored we pulled it out and tried our and at panning for gold. This was actually a lot of fun and Nathan loved finding the gold flakes. This kit is from the Discovery show Gold Rush and the pay dirt they send is guaranteed to have gold. I mean it was only like 6 flakes but still cool.

How are you keeping your kids entertained for the summer?