Back in August 2007 we began to keep a book of favorite summer memories. Each famliy member sums up the summer in their own words. For the younger ones, back before they could spell, it would consist of a drawing that expressed their view of the best part of summer vacation. As I was leafing thru this archive of our collective family recalls I was amazed by two things. First, how that the number of drawings have given way to words and sentences and secondly just how fast time goes by. Some of our trips that seem like last year were really 4 years ago! This summer was a summer of transition of individual maturity for our family. We picked an area that each person needed to work on and each person focused on that one thing. We watched our oldest complete a week of STEM camp and 5 weeks of boarding school with an emphasis on developing repsonsibilty and leadership skills in his chosen academic and athletic ventures. And complete it well he did! Our second son focused on what kind of young man he is becoming with emphasis on his spiritual priorities, career choice and peer selection. He voulnteered at the hospital, worked with local dentists and went on some awesome youth group outings. Very importantly, he discovered old cars and has spent many hours in the garage with my dad and myself working on the restoration of my first car and in the process scored himself a 1965 Comet! I have enjoyed getting to know this quite on better this summer. Our two youngest had shared goals of improved reading comprehension and completed a summer reading enrichment program! We have seen much improvment in reading speed and comprehension. Both boys were our travelers this summer each staying for prolonged times with each set of granparents. ( up to three weeks on the road!!) My wife concentrated on time with her aging grandparents who have not been in the best of health this past year. Both she and I worked on security system plans for our storage business and saw the intall of a sweet remote image storage security system by the end of summer. What stinks for me is that I still get to go to work during summer:( So... in addition to my practice I spent time on my two goals of training jiu jitsu for my blue belt test and working on reading a book on efffective parenting with a focus on how to best spend time with your wife and kids.....because if it is one thing that I have learned by leafing thru the book of summer memories is we need to strategically invest our time with our famliy because time is the one thing we cant stop and never seem to have enough of.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 02:44:22 +0000