Being a teacher, summer is one of my favorite times of the year. For eight or nine, straight weeks I can relax, catch up on my reading, drink coffee at a leisurely pace, and spend lots of time with my children. Today, as we drove home from a busy weekend of wedding festivities for my baby brother and my beautiful new sister-in-law; I started doing something I often do on Sunday afternoons, I started thinking about the week ahead. It was then that I realized that sometime in the middle of last week, my summer vacation had reached the half-way point. You know the point when there are fewer days left of summer vacation left and more days in your rear-view mirror.

In four short weeks, I will be heading back to work. So far this summer has been one of the best. It has been jam packed and full of fun. We've spent a week in Nags Head at a beach house with friends. My husband and I spent a long weekend in New York City to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. I've been tutoring and trying to prepare for my new position as the Reading Specialist of my school in the fall. Oh, and this weekend my son turned 6 (I still can't believe it) and my brother became a married man. We've also been squeezing in trips to the library, the pool, and to get ice cream, play dates, laundry, cleaning out and listing our rental property, dinners with friends and a little bit of couch snuggling.

At the beginning of every summer I make a giant mental list of all of the things I want to accomplish this summer. Tomorrow, I'm going to sit down with my 6 year old son and 3 year old daughter and we're going to come up with a list of things they want to do over the next few weeks. Two things they aren't allowed to put on the list...video games and television. We're going to make the most of the next four weeks before it's back to work!