Summer, Goodbye

So far, one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling has been that we've gotten to extend our summer. And what child doesn't love summer most of all? Or parent, for that matter...

Fortunately, summer runs long in Mississippi. By mid-August the scorching heat of a Southern summer settles into the "merely hot," so that has left us with a full month of summertime things to catch up on.  It's a total inversion of what our summers were like at the 53rd parallel, when we had three months of summer in which to cram in all of our outdoor fun.

In Edmonton, we basically lived at the park all summer. In Oxford, it is often so dangerously hot in the summer that parents' keep their kids indoors and the parks and playgrounds are eerily empty. Our first summer, I stubbornly marched my kids around the neighborhood and to the playground at 8:00 a.m. everyone morning to try to avoid the heat—and we were still dripping sweat by 9:00! This year, I was wiser, and we spent the heat of the summer traveling or doing indoor things. Now is our chance to catch up, and I am so glad that homeschooling leaves us free to do so.

So what have we been doing? What haven't we been doing?! We've spent many mornings and afternoons at the lake. We've gone on long walks in the woods, despite the bugs and snakes and ticks and chiggers. We've taken weekly trips to the Memphis Botanic Gardens. We attended the Strawberry Plains Hummingbird Migration Festival where we got to touch live hummingbirds. Did you know that a hummingbird's heart beats 1,200 times per minute? And Colin got to listen to every one!

Oh, and someone lost his first tooth...

I can't wait to see what Autumn brings.

*Here's our favorite late-summer circle time song of the moment, from Sing a Song of Seasons by Mary Thienes Schünneman:

Summer, goodbye
Summer, goodbye
You may no longer stay
Autumn is on it's way
Summer, goodbye
Summer, goodbye