Pool Days and Sunscreen

I keep telling myself over this last month that Olive cannot be my last baby!  This is way too much fun to not do all over again!  

This summer has been the best summer of my life.  I am loving being a stay at home mom in such a wonderful family friendly city.  My life this year is such a starke contrast to how I was with Mimi at this same age.  Mimi was in full time daycare by the time she was 5 months old.  For financial reasons, I could only stay home with Mimi part time until she was 5 months, then she was at daycare 45 hours a week!  I look back on that now and I think about how much I missed!  I loved our daycare provider, she was a family friend who happen to run a at-home licensed daycare.  She was affordable and I knew her long before I was even married.  Mimi learned so much and always seemed happy.  I was the one that was unhappy.  The weekdays were a chaotic mess of alarm clocks and rushing here to there.  

Now I wake up with no alarm clock.  My kids are my built in alarm clocks.  My husband has the flexibility to start work whenever he wants before 10, so our mornings are pretty leisurely.  After we all wake up and have a home cooked (!!!) breakfast (something our fulltime working days never allowed), my husband leaves for work and I have this empty canvas day.  Errands can be run whenever we feel up to it.  The house gets cleaned and messed up throughout the day...most days I am in my pajamas drinking coffee until at least 9am.  

From May to August our days mostly look like this....

No joke, Mimi is a fish.  Mimi will be 4 this July and can swim with no floaties.  I am beyond proud of this kid.  Swimming takes it out of her like nothing else.  We go to the YMCA a lot and I will workout for an hour while the kids play with toys and color pictures in the childcare.  Then we have a picnic lunch outside and swim until Olive gives us the sign that she's had enough, which is usually about two hours.  We go through our favorite sunscreen like crazy!  Sunscreen is one thing I'm pretty picky about.  I am fair skinned and burn very easily. In my 7 years in FL working on the water in the hot FL summers, this was the one sunscreen I found that stays on, doesn't irritate my skin or eyes, and works amazing!  It was only natural to use this one for my kids too.

This fall we start homeschooling Mimi, which is shaping up to be another adventure!  For now I'll enjoy these carefree pool days...