Summer is in full swing, and as usual I am struggling with guilty angst over having to work. I have this recurring issue: if I'm not working enough, I feel a sort of withdrawal and I'm distracted and I get impatient with the kids when I can't find a spare minute to check my email or make sure the blog hasn't blown up (which sounds pretty ridiculous when I type it out, but there you go). On the other hand, when I'm working too much I feel like we're missing out on summer and everyone else is having fun while I sit inside and stare at the wall and my poor children sit in camps or daycare staring out the window. I'm being completely overdramatic here, because of course they're having a great time; I'm just trying to give you a sense of how it plays out in my head. It's the never-ending quest for balance...or, maybe more accurately, to find contentment amidst the unbalance, a struggle that so many others share. My friends are already sick of hearing me blather on about it (And: I wrote about finding balance here on the blog last fall, and will surely write about it again...though, since that writing, Mr Rae's startup got funded and is going gangbusters...and, um, can I say HOORAY for THAT!!?!).

I'm sure in a few weeks we'll finally get this summer transition down, you know, just in time for summer to be over and for school to start. I have to try and laugh at myself a little about this...it's such a silly bourgeois problem, when so many parents don't have a choice about how much they work or spend time with their kids. Get over yourself, Rae. It's really more about adjusting my expectations than anything else. So we can't reproduce the free-range sort of summer that we remember -- only in the best light -- from our own childhoods (leaving the house at breakfast and wandering around all day unsupervised with the neighbor kids) for our own children? So what? We're still creating a happy, albeit different, kind of life. Our mothers are the first to remind us of that.

Meanwhile, some pictures of our summer so far, demonstrating that, good grief, we have had plenty of fun this summer! The ones at the beginning of this post are from the Carp Carnival (above) a few weekends ago (hilarious name, right?), and below are a few from a trip to the Toledo Zoo:

...some pics from our family vacation to North Carolina (which happened in May...not technically "summer," but oh well):

...a visit to the Peony Garden at the Arboretum here in Ann Arbor:

...a fun playdate:

...and just bumming around the house:

Meg's keeping it simple this summer with short blog posts that she entitles "Summer Journal." I like that idea, so I'm playing along today, and maybe more as the summer goes on. Feel free to join in: post to your blog with the title "Summer Journal" or add pics on Instagram and Twitter with hashtag #summerjournal.My goal for the summer? Try to get out of my head and enjoy it. So far, so good.

Summer Journal: our summer so far

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