Today was my first official day of summer break. What a wonderful feeling – even though I have tons of school work to do, I still have that ‘freedom-is-here’ summer break feeling. It’s wonderful. If you’ve never had a summer off from work, I highly recommend taking one off.

Since it is nearly summer, and I’m on vacation, I signed the monkey up for his annual swim lessons. Yes, I know he’s only two. BUT he has been in swim lessons since he was about 8 months old. He’s rather a good swimmer. And since we live in Florida, drowning capital of the US, I’m very paranoid about his ability to be comfortable in and around the water. I was a wee bit worried because he and I went swimming together a few weeks ago and he was quite scare of the water. Today he had no such problem. Other than wanting to get out of the water, he did swimmingly. 🙂 His instructor thinks he’ll only need a couple of weeks of lessons this year. Soon – later this year or early next – I think he’ll be able to begin to learn various swim strokes. Very cool.

After swimming, we headed to the golden arches for a reward breakfast. The reward isn’t actually the food, but the super cool playground. The monkey always asks to go into fast food restaurants to play on their playgrounds, but I rarely let him. Today was the exception. He had a great time. I realized that we need to find a different playground as a reward. The food is most certainly the same as it always has been, I had just never realized how incredibly greasy and bad for you it is. Ugh.

After all of this fun, we still managed to get to the grocery store. I wanted to go to the zoo too – but when I asked monkey he said that we couldn’t go. “The lions are closed, the monkeys are closed, the elephants are closed, and the dinosaurs are closed,” he says. I ask, “Why are all of the animals closed?” In his standard ‘my mom is an idiot’ tone he says, “The elephants have poop stuck in their butt, so they are closed. We can’t go to the zoo!”

After all of that, we did make it to our neighborhood playground. At about 1:00. In the full-sun. In Florida. In late-May. I’m an idiot – it was a crazy hot walk. Luckily I was thinking a little bit. I brought a cooler with assorted cold drinks and snacks that kept us hydrated.

I can only take pictures at swimming on Friday. I hope to get some good ones to post.

Off to give the monkey a bath. And to remove the pink nail polish from his toenails…. Adventurous days at home when mommy is on summer break. 🙂