Good Evening Everyone!!
OH how I have missed all of you. I am on vacation in southwest Florida and I haven’t been able to get onto my blog. Finally my husband has let his laptop out of his sight long enough for me to use it for a bit. I was so sad to see that a couple days this week not one person read any of my blogs 🙁
I know many of you read my blog daily so, apparently when I am gone and not writing I am out of sight , out of mind. Oh how easily I am forgotten. LOL.
So, we are on our annual family vacation in Sanibel, Florida and we are having a great time here and reconnecting with each other. It is wonderful not worrying about schedules and school, work or anything else. Our family really relaxes and we spend time together just hanging out swimming, collecting shells, playing on the beach, playing games, just being together.
We often have to explain ourselves to our children’s school each year as to why they are going to miss 2 weeks of school. Last Friday when I went to pick up my son from his school, I told them he would be gone for the next 2 weeks. My son then says, “Yep, I will be gone for 15 days.” Well, the office lady promptly looks at me and says, “15 days? You can’t be gone 15 days, we will have to release him from the school then.” Meaning, he will be expelled from school and need to repeat 2nd Graderk. I looked at her and said, “Uh, we talked to the principal and he is only missing 9 days of school.”
Hello?!!! Did she not think we had already talked with the Principal and told him and the teacher? And since when is it too important for a 2nd grader and a Kindergartner to miss 2 weeks of school? Now, I understand they will miss some things however, we do homework down here and we fully expect our children to devote some time daily to their studies while we are down here.
But, we also believe it is just as important to reconnect as a family. My husband tends to sometimes work long hours. There are some days he never even gets to see the baby because he left before she woke up and came home after she went to bed. Then, you add in family activities and school and just plain life and sometimes, family time is very little or non-existent.
We need this time each year to catch up with our family, to connect with the children and frankly, just to have nothing to think about for a while. As long as our children continue to excel in school and don’t fall behind, we will continue to pull them out for 2 weeks each year to be together.
I think it will be especially important as they start to grow up more and spread their wings more and we get less and less of their time. These are the formative years and frankly, I believe my husband and I are doing the right thing. We want to be the biggest influence in their lives in these early years and we want our children to continue to value family time as they get older. And if it takes them missing 2 weeks of school each year to do it, well, so be it.
Stand up for your family time! Stand up for your children. You are their parents…no one else is and sometimes, you can’t always follow the rules when it comes to protecting that precious little time we have with our children before they are grown up and out of the house.
Now just so you all know, we do strongly value education and so do our children, however I believe sometimes education isn’t only to be had in the classroom. You can learn a lot from going other places too.
Blessings to you all and please excuse my typing…my husbands laptop has some really interesting’tricks’ it does. Like, when you are typingg and all of a sudden it pauses and starts typingg in some other random sentence up the page….yeah, it’s neat but, at least I have a laptop to use on vacation!
Greetings to you all from Sunny Florida and I hope to be back to the blog for more soon!