I have been dreading it for a month already.  SUMMER. It’s not that the kids are home.  They’re home all the time.  It’s that the STRUCTURE of the school year is gone.  Whether you home-school or away-school, the day revolves around school time.  And for a few blessed hours, no one is wandering around making messes, whining about boredom, or begging to play the Xbox.

Unfortunately, in all my googling, I see that there are many high-energy, elaborate ways to keep my kids organized this summer.

Forget THAT!

So here are my four strategies:

1. Theme of the Month!

For one month after school is finished, we have one rule.  “Put it away immediately.”  How is this lazy?  Well, there’s no other cleaning going on AT ALL.

There’s no massive clean out or decluttering or revamping of lifestyle other than Theme of the Month.  You *can* clean out a drawer if you desperately desire, but for one month we’re just focusing on maintaining this exact level of mess without adding to it.

During the summer, toy after toy, after project after project is pulled out.  Unless I have the TV on non-stop, my house WILL explode when summer vacation hits. So, unless they’re only walking away to go tinkle, it must be put it away.  Until this is mastered, there’s no sense in doing a big clean out.  And frankly, yelling “Theme of the Month!” sounds better than “Why are you leaving your crap everywhere?  All I do is clean up behind you! Pick all this up!”

2. Kid of the Day

We have four kids, but only three old enough to fight over the front captain’s chair in the back of the minivan.  So years ago, we assigned days of the week.  Monday-Tuesday is the oldest.  Wednesday-Thursday is the middle.  Friday-Saturday is the youngest.  Sunday is first come, first served. No kid ever forgets their days.

Using that structure as a peg, we recently attached a HELPER day to it.  If it’s your seat day, you get to help cook, but you are also the dishwasher unloader, the laundry switcher, the one who picks up behind baby, takes out the chicken bucket, waters the animals, and the one I yell for when I need you to bring me more wipes or anyone yells for toilet paper.  How is this lazy?  NO CHORE CHARTS.

3. Meal Planning

Even if you never meal plan any other time of the year, do it for the summer to give your days SOME structure.  As I wrote in 5 Lazy Ways to Simplify Your Days, I use benchmarks, not the clock to organize our life.  No school?  No benchmarks!  ACK!

Focusing on meals helps the kids feed that “what’s coming next” curiosity that is so consistently filled during the school year.  What’s for dinner, lunch, breakfast?  I can tell my kids what’s for lunch six days from now and they really like that.

But meal planning can be a super complicated affair.  Remember, we’re being LAZY, so here are the rules:

• Plan LAME, easy stuff. No lamb chops with mint reduction or some such nonsense.  Try this: Grilled cheese, turkey sandwiches, Taco Bell night, Crockpot chicken, hot dogs, frozen pizza.  That’s a week of dinners. WOOT!  Wanna see me do lunches?…PB tortilla roll-ups, turkey rolled around raw veg, mini pizzas, yogurt shakes, cheese/cold cuts and crackers, leftovers.
• Don’t try to be too healthy…yet.  We try to maintain a sane level of protein around here, minus as many nitrates as we can easily weed out, but for the first month or so of summer, there’s a lot of french fries up in here.  Remember, we’re trying to survive, people!  Ditch perfection for a month and go for NOT POISON.
• Don’t use the oven, if you can help it.  In addition to usually signaling that you’ve officially spent too much time on this meal, using the oven heats up your house and makes you cranky. Most importantly, your helper is probably too afraid to use it (or you’re too afraid to let him.) If you can’t make it on the stove, crockpot, or toaster over, it’s not happening.
• Let the kids cook, and waste time.  Summer is  the time for more time consuming (though SIMPLE) meals, since there’s lots of time to be consumed and kids will flip pancakes for an hour just to do it.  So the kids took 45 minutes to make PB and J?  Awesome.
• Make the kids do the planning.  Since the Kid of the Day has things he wants to help cook, I involved the kids in the meal planning (read: make them do the meal planning).  You probably require more variety out of yourself than they do.  They just want their turn this week with the stick blender or the griddle.  We have muffins least once a week, and if I don’t make sure it rotates between the cooks, I have some angry chefs. Muffin pans are apparently AWESOME.

4. Establish a Routine

Here’s ours:

• Breakfast, play outside while it’ not too hot.
• Lunch, TV time while we digest and rest.
• Mid-Afternoon, find our friends in the neighborhood or head to Grammy’s house.
• Dinner, bath, bed.

Good luck with your summer!  I let you know if I survive mine….

deanna

1.  Find your farmer’s markets

Most markets are open now. We have seven in our area. There’s one open every day of the week. Not only are there fresh greens, but the egg season has started (Valentine’s to Halloween), and the mama animals are making lots of milk. It’s time to find out what fresh really tastes like!

2.  Preserve the spring harvest

Now is the time for greens, radishes, broccoli, and other cool season crops to come in. If you buy conventionals in the store, now is the time they’re most likely to be local and fresh. Get em’ blanch ‘em, freeze ‘em.  Don’t make my mistake and eat them till you’re so sick of looking at them that you don’t freeze any.  You’ll be sad in a few months.

3.  Join a CSA

Community Support Agriculture (CSA) memberships are like belonging to a community garden with hired help. You may or may not have to work in the garden, but the kinds of produce you get will be much like owning a large garden of your own. Don’t expect them to look like grocery store produce and be sure to get your freezer bags ready. Four days in a row of turnips is too much for anyone. It’s like having a personal farmer, not a personal store. Search out local CSA memberships in your area through localharvest.org or ask around at your local farmer’s market.

4.  Plant your hot crops

After your last frost, it’s time to get the tomatoes, eggplant, squash, and other frost tender crops in the ground. Unless you seed started in the winter, forget seeding tomatoes and peppers. But, unless you just want a jump on the harvest, it’s not necessary to buy plants for anything in the squash family (cukes, zukes, winter squash, etc.)

5. Get some chicks

Last chance to get chicks from the feed store. If you’re not picky about breeds and just want a dependable layer come fall, go scoop up a few. Lock them in an outdoor dog kennel until they’re big enough to not fit through the fence. And if you decide you don’t like them, put them up on Craig’s list for what you paid and they’ll be gone my noon. Until you BUY or BUILD a coop, chickens are a zero cost hobby to scuttle. $20 bucks in chickens and feed, an old dog kennel, water in a bowl. DONE.

Things to Ignore (because it’s not the right season)

• Now is probably too late to get bees. You needed to order your bees a while back or catch a swarm earlier in the Spring, at least in the south where we are.
• Unless it’s cold where you are, now is not the time to plant trees. I know you want fruit trees, but hold that thought until fall.
• Forget about planting spring crops unless your spring is just arriving. Right now we’re HARVESTING spring crops. Since it’s already starting to get hot here don’t put in broccoli now. It will be spindly and PITIFUL, if it comes up at all.

To everything, there is a season, unless you live in the burbs and the seasons are totally obscured by shipments from Mexico and California.

Reduces Your To Do List

Pioneer homesteaders lived seasonally.  There were no tomatoes in the winter, no acorn squash in May.  In the burbs, though, we can have anything we want almost any day of the year.  While this flexibility allows us the freedom to have salsa in the winter, it also means that there’s no OFF season for something.   There’s no time when you say, well, it’s too late for THAT, I’ll think about it again in nine months.  It never leaves the list of possible options and too many options make life overwhelming!  The mental to-do list grows and grows and GROWS.

I was talking to an acquaintance yesterday about bees.  She wants to talk to the bee people and set up a hive.  It’s one of the many things on her mental to do list and it would sit there until she got around to it.  But unless she already has a hive set up, ordered bees last November, or a friend caught a swarm for her last month, it’s too late to worry about bees this season.  Sweet!  One less thing to worry about right now.

Reduces Your Costs

Buying up all the apples in APPLE SEASON and knowing how to store them through the winter reduces the cost of apples throughout the off season.  You already have them in your attic.  Preserving sweet potatoes during SWEET POTATO SEASON means that you can have sweet potatoes fries year round for $.25 a pound.

And choosing a season for your crafting allows you to buy in bulk as well.  It’s much more economical to plan out your needs for a particular craft and shop once a year when everything is on sale, than to run to the store every two weeks.

But How Do I Do It?

Well, I can provide some basic guidelines that I use to set up my year.

Spring:Baby season
Baby animals arrive, baby plants arrive, eggs, honey, and milk start revving up for the year.  This is the heavy lifting time for the garden and the barn.  Baby animals need more care than grownups.  Baby plants too, but by summer, it’s just harvest, harvest, harvest.

Summer:Home Preserving
While I have the canner out and the mountain of freezer bags handy, I just do it all.  Herbs, summer fruits, pesto, the works.  And while the mama cows are producing the most milk, it’s time to make the cheese.  And summer is the time to order your grass fed meats before the October slaughter.

Fall: DIY Season
If you give teacher presents, your soap needs to be curing at Halloween.  While we’re doing that, might as well get all the crocheted washcloths done, the household cleaning supplies mixed, the lip balm and body butter set for the year.  And it’s the last chance for fresh eggs or raw milk soaps and lotions.  And since your grass fed meat just arrived, it’s time to make the bacon and jerky for the year.  While you’re out and about, be sure to pick up any clean bags of leaves you see.  Tis the season for hoarding!

Winter: Wood Season
Building, planting trees, lasagna bed making, ordering animals.  This is the time to get out the catalogs and be thinking about next year’s garden, bees, rabbits, chicks, goats, or what-have-you.  Get your research done and your orders in before they sell out.   If you’re going to build a hive or a bunch of raised beds, now is the time.  Get all those bags of leaves out you robbed from the neighbors and start layering for next spring.  If you want to put in that new apple tree or cut down that old pine, do it before the sap starts running again.

Regardless, Relax

Now, all of this might sound like way too much, but you can build your own seasonal rotation based on your own habits and hobbies and sports.  Maybe you have to attend game after game in a certain season and you can get all the knitting done for Christmas.  Maybe you don’t garden at all but you do something else that puts you in touch with a person who has mountains of pears; that can be drying season for you. The important thing is not just to establish an ON season, but to establish an OFF season.  Deadlines are good for us accomplishing things, and additionally good for us letting things go once they pass.

Simple living isn’t simple if the to do list never ends.