Look What Danny Made: Summer Edition

Hi blog!  I finished Project Gastronome and ended up taking a month-long vacation from you, didn't I?  Where have I been?  I can't say too much; I will simply point out that in the month when I wasn't posting, Osama Bin Laden was taken out...

OK, the truth is that every time I finish one of my projects I have a few days of despair, wondering how I will follow it, and what I can possibly write about in the meantime that will be worth reading.  In this instance, I just let it come out as laziness.  But here I am, with summer in front of me, and a renewed drive to blog!  I don't consider myself to be anything close to a Writer, but one piece of advice that I've always heard Writers give is that the key to writing is... writing.  Write every day, even when you don't want to.  Even if you feel like what you're putting out isn't that great.  The point is that you are staying in the habit and keeping the wheels greased.  I have a few summer goals in mind, and one of them is to be more regular with posting in here.  In the meantime, I've got some catching up to do.

When I was growing up, I took for granted how cool it was to be the child of two educators in the summer time.  I did fun stuff like scout camp and Vacation Bible School, but mostly I just got to be at home or at the pool and do anything I wanted to do.  Courtney and I have always had our kids enrolled in year-round daycares or preschools.  With Blake finishing kindergarten this year, it's the first time we've had to make sure he's taken care of.  The answer is sort of a patchwork of different things.  There are two days a week when my parents are very generously having him over to their home, and we've also signed him up for a few different sports camps, museum programs, and VBS.  Courtney has tried to schedule herself for as many weekend shifts as possible so that she can be home and awake during the week while Blake is there.  I'll be taking some time off during the summer, too, to try and soothe some of this working parent guilt over shuffling my child around so much.

But there are some things that I'm also very excited about this summer!  We are planning to meet up with several of our friends from all over Texas for a long weekend in August, when we will be renting a house at Schlitterbahn.  We've done this before, but I think this is the first year when all of our kids will really be big enough to enjoy it.  Instead of doing swim lessons through the Y this year, I'm taking it on myself to spend that time in the water with each of my kids, and it's been a lot of fun so far.  I'm looking forward to seeing how much stronger they are in the pool by the end of summer.  Ava is already much more brave than she was just two weeks ago.  After nearly a year of having our house on the market, we made the decision to unlist it and stay in it for a few more years.  Although I'm a little disappointed that it didn't move like we'd hoped, I'm also excited at the prospect of doing a few summer home improvement projects.  I've never been especially handy, so it'll be a learning experience.

What I am very excited about right now, though, is that I have another Look What Danny Made! project starting on July 1.  Unlike Projects Horror, Valentine, and Gastronome, this one will actually take me outside of my house.  It's also going to be a whole new realm of experience for me, and marks the first time that one of my projects has received outside sponsorship!  You know me, I don't like to give away the details too soon, but watch this space for more information in the days to come.