What were your summer activities?

The twins are going to something called Tot Lot two mornings a week. Supervised pre-school kids hang at a park and play games and do crafts; parents are not allowed. It got me thinking about some of my summer activities (which greatly depended on age). Here's a quick list that doesn't include all the unstructured time just playing with the neighborhood kids.

Tennis lessons (which I hated and sucked)
Swimming lessons
Girl Scout day camp
Girl Scout overnight camp
Yearbook camp (The summer before my senior year; I was the editor)
Softball team
Hanging at the local park, which was staffed with older teens. We could make crafts if we paid for the materials. They also lead us in organized games. This was just something the city did and anyone could show up.
Lots of camping with the family
Spending time with my grandma and uncle (and sometimes my aunts). Grandma looked after us when my mom worked (very part-time)
Watching the boys play league softball

What were yours?

Comments

[Christopher Tassava]

I've been thinking a lot about this as we've tried to choose summer activities for Julia. My most distinct memories are of riding bikes around my grandpa's farm, where I lived from second to sixth grades. We played a lot with the kids in the big family up the road, too. Lots of trips to the Carnegie library in town. I honestly can't remember any truly structured activities during those years - though I did help with haybaling each August.

After we moved into town for my junior high years and then another town for my high school years, I remember tons of outdoor time that changed from straight play (mammoth games of kick-the-can and tag) to more structured stuff like getting in my training miles for cross country, or just biking all over creation with my friends. Evenings, I'd stay up as late as possible reading, outside or inside. I never went to summer school or anything like that, and we either didn't have enough money or we lived too far out of town for me to participate in summer camp-type stuff - except one summer when I went to St. Lawrence Seminary for a Catholic youth camp, and a couple times I went to some sort of youth-leadership camp at UW-Whitewater.

[Question]

Things came back to me after I wrote this post. I also spent tons of time reading and at the library (my mom was a librarian). I even volunteered there during the summer.

We lived about a mile from Lake Michigan so we often took our bikes there or to our grandma's, who lived on the lake. (She also had a pool, so we swam a lot).