What I Did For My Summer Vacation

Leading up to Rahul's adoption I prepared a lot.  I read books, I shopped for supplies, I found doctors, dentists, Hindi translation services, I even moved to a new neighborhood with a better school.  One thing that I was completely unprepared for, though, was summer.  Rahul came home with me in April 2008 and I immediately put him in school.  But it wasn't until there were only a few days left of school that I came up with any type of plan for what he was going to do during summer vacation while I was at work!  Not surprisingly, that summer was a bit of a mess.  And in fact, it took me a couple of years before I came up with the perfect combination of activities to fill his time without killing me financially and over-scheduling his vacation.  But, seriously, this summer (our fifth together) was by far the best!

Last winter Rahul began asking me if there were places where one could dig for gems, fossils, minerals, etc. so I turned to my good friend Google for some ideas.  The first thing I found was this amazing dinosaur dig in South Dakota that seemed perfect (http://www.paleoadventures.com) .  Then I realized that South Dakota was a great place to dig for other treasures like gold and gems, so I built a vacation around traveling there.  Then I learned that Rahul's best friend Justin, who moved to Japan last year, was coming to NYC to visit for several weeks over the summer.  So Justin's mom and I coordinated our schedules so that Justin arrived just as we were returning from our South Dakota trip.  We arranged for him to stay with us for a week and for the boys to travel together to my parents' house of Lake Ontario for a week.  My parents are retired and live in an amazing place and they are unbelievably generous, so each summer they watch Rahul for a few weeks at their place while I come back to NYC to work and catch up on a year's worth of missed sleep and social activity.  So when Justin returned to Japan, Rahul stayed at the lake and fished, swam, and had all kinds of adventures with his grandparents for a few weeks.  And our very last activity of the summer was to visit one of our favorite places on Labor Day weekend:  Libby's Beach (which is actually the Jersey Shore, but my bff Libby's family lives there...)!

Enjoy...