My friend, Franki, shared this link with me: Mom’s Summer Bucket Lists. Franki and I like to joke that we are successful when we manage to put on lotion or lipstick. On the rare occasions when both occur, it is a gold star day.

The article made me realize that although I helped my kids write three things they want to make sure happen this summer, I kind of slid through without a list of my own. I say kind of, because I did make a list. Looking at it now, I realize it wasn’t a list for me. It was a list for them.

I’m not a big subscriber to the do-all-kinds-of-things-for-yourself movement. I think it’s important to take care of yourself, but that self-care can happen in small (and effective) doses — like lotion and lipstick.

At the same time, I’m not a big subscriber to wear-yourself-ragged-because-you-only-take-care-of-others-and-never-yourself mentality. It’s important to take care of others. We all have someone in our lives who drains energy — every single one of us knows what this is like. We are better at caring for others when we care for ourselves too (in small and effective doses).

Currently, I’m more on the ragged and tattered side of things. This is why the idea of a Summer Bucket List resonates with me. I’m claiming today as my first official day of summer and extending the season to September 5. Typically, I start to enter “autumn” when school starts. Not this year. I’m keeping summer in my heart for the next two months.

Following the inspiration from Franki…

1. {Move} Somehow with ball games and friends over and needing this and getting that, I’ve lost my regular and expected movement each day. I believe in movement being a lifestyle, not a regiment, and so with this item, it can be a run (and will be some days), but a walk with a friend or a bike ride or a family game of football in the yard all count. The point is I move every day. I stretch in the morning, I move during the day, and I crunch or lift or balance at night.
2. {Write} My writing life has become a mess. This once disciplined 1000 words/day girl has become a tangled mess of a writer. It is time to reclaim the space with one hour/day in order to find my footing with an evolved process and an expanded territory of topic, audience, and purpose.
3. {Preserve} When I consider what I will miss most if I don’t do it this summer, preservation came to mind. I want to preserve summer through photos, scrapbook pages, and canning. I wish I could say something like, each week I’ll spend three hours preserving photos, stories, or food, but I don’t work this way. Rather, by the end of the summer, I’ll have uploaded and printed photos for the first half of 2014, bought an album for Jay and have some scrapbook pages inside it, and replace the shelves of empty canning jars with full ones.