Savoring Summer {Staying in the Season}

The desk full of binders, calendars, sports schedules and dreamy ideas is where I currently find myself, while my mind continues to stray back to the mountains and clouds of our trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

We have been home for a week and I decided in future, I must come home better mentally prepared for the onslaught of emails and to-do items that pile up when we go away for two whole weeks. The fact that school resumes one week from today only intensifies the pressure to get it all done right away.

Usually at this point in August I am eager for cooler, less humid days hinting at the beauty of spicy Autumn flavors. Not this year. I am so invigorated by my return to normal movement following the long recovery from knee surgery that I don't want these summery days to end. At least not until they officially end on September 23, 2014.

This year feels like a do-over, the last one so consumed by injury, pain and slow, slow, slow recovery. My mind is bursting with goals and creative aspirations. I am (surprisingly) eager to resume the familiar round of driving to multiple soccer and now football (ack) practices that completely overtake our evenings and weekends. The reality is clear, my days must be set aside for chores and staying on top of our family life while the nights will be full-on taxi driving and hurry scurry. My husband's already full travel schedule seems to have morphed into superhuman status including several trips abroad for two weeks at a time. We have come to grips with the fact that we will see each other much less while our schedules have simultaneously become much busier.

But this is the way of things I have learned, that all families simply get busier each year and many husbands are gone for longer stretches of time than my own. We can do this and, luckily, I feel up to the task. So until September 23, I plan to savor each moment of this season and continue crossing items off the Summer 2014 Bucket Lists before I finish the Fall 2014 bucket list I may have already started working on.