The Countdown

Today the kids informed me there are only 31 days of school. I need to begin planning our summer!

The kids and I agreed to do the same plan as last year-during the week it will be relaxing at home with trips to the community pool in the afternoon. Then we'll have our "Fun Fridays," where each Friday we plan a day trip to somewhere. Last year we went to a pretzel factory and community park, several playgrounds with a treat at an ice cream parlor, and on the weeks we were away on vacation I made sure that Friday we did something unusual like visit a theme park or horseback riding.

The vacation days usually went over budget, but the standard budget for our Friday was $40. The kids didn't think that was much and wanted a souvenir on one trip. Then I explained to them that there were 12 Fridays in the summer. When I had them do the math and they realized we were spending more than $400 on our Fun Fridays they understood why they couldn't each buy something on that trip.

And as a scrapbooker, I loved doing a summer scrapbook that featured just our Fun Fridays. I could plan the book's page count and layouts ahead of time and finish it by the end of summer, because each Friday was featured on two pages. It was a great memory book for the kids to look back on and see what they did for the entire summer. My daughter even took it to school at the beginning of the year for Show and Share time on what they did on their summer vacation.