Now that Labor Day has come and gone, I wanted to share a bit about how we handled our first summer as two working parents to an elementary-school student. As a consummate planner, I looked ahead to this summer and thought about it for actual years in advance, knowing it would require thoughtfulness and careful planning to execute what I thought was best, in the way I wanted to live it out. Today, you get to see a bit of the fruit of that :) In the hopes that our experience might help someone else, I’ll start with a little background information and a few thoughts that helped guide my planning, share a bit about what this first summer looked like, and then end with some thoughts on how it all turned out. I hope it’s helpful. For all the content that is pumped out daily online, this is not the type of thing that gets talked about very often, but as a parent, it’s the type of thing that matters very much to me. Here we go! A little background info In bullet-point form! In previous years, June attended daycare and preschools that were essentially year-round, so we did not have to come up with a special care plan for the summer months. Our younger two kids still largely kept to their “school-year” routines this summer. Where we live, we have the option of attending a traditional calendar or a year-round public elementary school. We opted for the traditional calendar. Call me stubborn or nostalgic (or both), but long summers at home were formative for me, and it’s important to me to offer the same to my kids, even if it means more effort on our part. When we began to plan for this summer, we considered three things