Just being honest

As I take a personal time out and sit and listen to the chaos around my home I wonder what I was thinking celebrating this time of year.  Screams echo through the home... some happy, some angry, some sad.  The fridge opens and shuts at least six times in the 10 minutes I've been sitting here.  One child clings to my leg like shes hanging onto a rope, dangling above a tank of sharks complaining about how awful this summer is compared to others.   All the while holding a fake blood capsule in her hands pretending to pop it in my all white room, just trying to get my attention.  And then let's not forget the all too familiar, "Mom, I'm bored."  Ahh, the sweet sounds of summer.

As the last day of school approached I can promise you that I was more excited than the kids, but by lunchtime Monday my mind had changed.  I forgot how helpless my children are at finding their own fun!  When I was a kid, summer was a time when you were overjoyed just by the freedom it gave you!  Freedom to do whatever you wanted.  Play outside all day, read a book for hours, run through sprinklers, make forts, imagine.  Now all I get are complaints about how we haven't plan an extravagant expensive field trip every single day and heaven forbid if mom might have some responsibilities to take care of.  When did this happen!?  When did kids get this sense that their parents were responsible for anything more than a trip to the park or an occasional shaved ice if they were lucky?!

I have to confess that I totally fell into it this first week of summer and we did a lot of fun things. I had originally thought this post would highlight all those fun things, but it occurred to me that the reason my kids want to do all these crazy things (and me as well), is because we have seen all the creative summer posts on facebook and read all the blogs from the super moms and feel like some how we aren't doing summer justice if we don't.  So this is not going to be one of those posts.

Instead this post is dedicated to the "crazy" behind the amazing photos we all share.

Here are the cute photos I shared from the outing we took to Farmington trail last Tuesday.  So pretty. Everyone looks so happy.  That's because just hours before this mom was at the end of her rope and after yelling at the kids about how she was not going to do anything else fun for them this week, shipping one of the kids off to a friends house, and stressing through an orthodontists appointment with  4 crazy kids, she just needed them out of the car.  Kids are happy because they are not stuck in their rooms like I had threatened earlier. And what you didn't see in these photos is how our cute five year old decided she just couldn't walk anymore and how I pulled her behind me the entire way back to the car.  See, doesn't that inspire you to walk that same trail!?

Here are the photos of our amazing trip to Carver Cove petting farm.  It really was a ton of fun, but what you don't see is our 18 month old being pulled off their tractor a dozen times, all the sneezing from the cotton flying around (that was at the trail as well), and lets not forget jack throwing up the next day from what all we can guess is a case of not washing his hands well enough before eating lunch.  Yuck!

And this ones for the moms.

 Let's not forget the cute selflies that make us all want to get our hair done, put on make up and pretend to causally take photos that look like we just woke up perfectly put together.








 "Yeah, we just happened to be wasting time, so we snapped a random shot, looked beautiful, and shared it with the world."









No.








Lets not hide the fact that there are a dozen bad selfies...










for every one...

that we share.





haha  :)





So this summer lets set a good example to all our kids and be grateful and happy with who we are and what's in front of us.


And absolutely go out and have fun but don't do it because you feel like you have to.






Let's do it for ourselves...






 and let's try to cut out some of the "crazy" this summer!