Summer in the Nap house isn’t really about any one thing. It’s popsicles by the pool that melt faster than anyone can eat them, s’mores around a fire, crackers at the beach that somehow end up with more sand than cracker on them, and about four hundred requests for another twenty minutes outside before bed. The whole season kind of blurs together, which I think is the point.
Two trips anchor it, though. The first is Wolfeboro with Jenna’s family, the Grays, on Lake Winnipesaukee. Fifty years in the family and it still runs like clockwork. The big development this year is that Ellie and Jack are finally going to tube. They’ve been talking about it for weeks, somewhere between thrilled and slightly nervous about it, which is honestly the best way to be about anything. We’re excited to watch them take the leap.
Then in August we head to Stowe with the Nap family – my siblings and all the cousins, four years running now. Most people picture Stowe in December, and we do that too, but the mountain in summer is a completely different place. The kids spend half the trip in the hotel pool and the other half riding the gondola, which they genuinely adore. My nephew Logan loves it so much that he requested a “gondola” party for his third birthday, which we celebrate up there. My mother and my sister Julia have August birthdays too, so the whole weekend has quietly turned into a birthday trip with a mountain attached.
We had two more birthdays before that. Grayson turned four in June, and he has spent the entire summer in the water. He can swim all the way across the pool now without any help, which he will not shy away from reminding you about. When he’s not swimming he’s doing math. He found a show called Numberblocks and has been fully committed ever since – if you have young kids and haven’t come across it yet, I’d recommend it.
And then there’s Henry, who turned two on the 25th. We kept his birthday quiet this year, just cake at home, nothing elaborate. Which felt about right, considering how much attention he demanded on the way in two years ago. He is now going full tilt. He races his brothers on a scooter. He dribbles a basketball, or does something close enough to dribbling that we’ve all agreed to call it that. He will dropkick any ball he can get his hands on, regardless of what sport is actually being played. And several times a day he walks over, puts both arms straight up, and asks me to lift him so he can dunk.
The funny thing about summer with four kids is that the calendar looks packed and the days still manage to be whatever they want to be. Nobody remembers what we planned. They remember the tube, and the gondola, and the twenty extra minutes.
I hope you get a stretch this summer where nothing much has to happen. And if a two-year-old asks you to lift him up so he can dunk, just do it.
