I hope you are enjoying my School Holidays Rock blog posts with my first awesome guest post from Nicki over at Curly and Candid.

Now it’s time for the next instalment. Please welcome Pippa from A Mothers Ramblings to my blog. Enjoy her post and don’t forget to check out her great blog too.

The summer before Top Ender started school I was on maternity leave (as I was expecting Big Boy) and so Daddy and I took her out of nursery and Top Ender and I spent our time together. There was a heat wave that summer and so we spent a lot of time in the garden wearing our swimming costumes and dipping our feet in the paddling pool to keep cool. We spent long summer days with me reading books to Tops, colouring in pictures, finding out everything that she loved, playing with her dolls and doing all the things that families should do together. As soon as Big Boy was born he joined our lazy fun days and together we carried on learning more about each other. To us the theme for our Summer holidays was set, they were something to look forward to, time together to relax, to spend together as a family and time to have fun.

I hate when I hear other parents complain about the summer holidays, that they are too long or that they don’t know what to do with their children during all this time off. I don’t understand how parents don’t look forward to the time together, the chance to re-connect and to strengthen the bonds between each other. Sure the length of time stretching out in front of people could be worrying but it’s not as if they don’t have any time to prepare or if they haven’t been given any warning that they are coming!

Every Summer since Top Ender started School, we have created a list together of things that we want to do, places we want to go and things that we want to learn together. This list is something that we add to all through the year, it might be that we want to picnic by a lake, or have a water fight in the garden or even just have lazy days where we don’t get out of our pyjamas and snack all day. We look at the summer holidays as time to do all the things that we have been dreaming about, thinking about and things that we will remember during the colder Autumn and Winter months.

We develop a new routine during the summer holidays, we have a different rhythm. It’s not that we dislike our school time routine, it’s just that it is more rigid. We can pretty much set our own times during the Summer Holidays for everything and as long as we achieve what we set out in our to do list then we are happy. I guess what I am trying to say is that I love the Summer Holidays because for us here at A Mothers Ramblings it is time for us to be together.

Many thanks to both Nicki and Pippa for their great guest posts.