The forecast calls for steady rain this weekend. Weekend planning this time of year involves a lot of studying the forecast. I am supposed to run with a friend Saturday morning and my husband is supposed to run the Broad Street 10-miler on Sunday, but neither of us wants to run if it’s raining buckets. Fortunately, since no one is doing outdoor team sports such as baseball or soccer this spring we don’t have to work around potentially canceled kid events.
Either way, I’ll be singing bluegrass music (if all goes well it will be with Monroe Crossing). And I’ll be going to our preschool’s fundraising event. The theme is “prom” but I don’t really have a prom dress so I’ll figure out something else…
I just hit upload on a camp medical form, which needed to be signed by a physician (and not just the stamp on the record the practice generates after a visit; the camp wanted their own form signed). I really hope this child enjoys this camp this summer, but the volume of work on this one has been intense. First, he had to test in, so the testing had to be arranged (fortunately online; my school back in the day participated in a “talent search” whereby we took the SAT as 7th and 8th graders, which then qualified us for these sorts of camps, but his middle school doesn’t do this). Then there was the back and forth over what his school algebra class covered, and whether he could take a certain engineering class as a result. Then the camp medical papers required me to input his vaccination record into drop down menus, and get the form signed by the pediatrician, so I drove to the office twice yesterday (to drop off and pick up; I paid for the expedited service). Phew! And that’s one kid and one camp. I have four other kids and other camps. But fortunately none of the rest seem to be involved as this.
In the meantime, plans are starting to take shape for the summer. There will be a few trips and some beach time. The kids are in some camps, though everyone has a few weeks off from camps too. I figure there can be down time, and then they can also do some amusement park type activities during those weeks.
(If you have multiple kids, I recommend creating a camp spreadsheet. Put the names of your kids along the top, and weeks of summer down the left hand side. Then you can plot in what everyone is doing each week, and make sure this all makes sense.)
Over the summer the kids can also play in our organized playroom. In one of my recent life hacks posts I talked about outsourcing organizing. You can see some of the bins and labels in the picture accompanying this post. Let’s hope the kids stick with the system!
I may or may not have put my own MD credentials on some camp medical forms this year (what? I’m still board certified in gen peds!). Hopefully no one will pay much attention . . .
@SHU- sounds like a life hack right there! Alas, no MD credentials for me…
I may or may not have done this in the past. Possibly for a child to return to PE after having stitches removed (I WAS the physician who removed the stitches)…There are some perks to this job.
@Gillian – if you’re the physician who removed the stitches, that seems totally legit to me!
@Laura I have removed a lot of stitches at my kitchen table.
I’ve been spending time planning summer and feel like I am not getting very far. My oldest will turn 17 this summer and it is his last summer home with us, which just feels very monumental. Although I guess he will still be home next summer before he goes to college.
@Jessica – also with kids that age they want to plan a lot of their own summer too. I’m not planning too much for my will-be-16-year-old — he’s going to have to figure some of that out on his own.
I think the camp spreadsheet (1 Google sheet with new tabs each year so I could defense back) will go down as one of my favorite digital mementos for my kids’ childhoods.
Strangely enough, other than a sleep away church camp both are attending, our schedule is basically empty this summer. My daughter will work every day at the camp run by her karate studio and my son has aged out of local baseball camps so he’ll have a lot of down time. The season of the camp spreadsheet is past but I’m thankful I still have a couple more summers with both kids at home.
Do you think you could do a post on camps? Our guy will be 8 next year and makes friends really easily so I think he might like overnight camps but I don’t know what to look for. When I google search it seems like things vary so widely. I am nervous to ask friends. In the past when I’ve asked to advice, I get “I would never…” or the people I talk with are way beyond my income, so I feel nervous asking
@LauraK – camps are tricky! I would just recommend asking people even if you think their price ranges might be different from yours because you can always do your own research afterwards. If you ask a wide variety of people then you’ll probably get a wide variety of suggestions. We haven’t done that many, but my eldest went to a pre-college program at Brown University last summer, and my 13-year-old is doing one of the CTY programs for 3 weeks this summer. He’ll also do a week of Boy Scout camp, but that’s with his troop so there wasn’t much searching involved.