I’m not sure if people are desperate for summer (with good cause after Jersey’s abysmal winter) or just making conversation, but I’m getting the “what are you doing this summer” question a lot these days.  I guess it makes sense when camps are already recruiting, bathing suits are in all the major department stores, and barbeque grills are lined up outside Home Depot. 

We plan one major vacation during the summer, for which I’m grateful since we never went on vacation when I was growing up.  During my childhood, if the family made it out to the Poconos for a weekend, it was a major event.  Before the kids, hubby and I went to Europe several times during which we  marvelled at countries so old that ours, in comparison, is an embryo.  My son was born a year before 9/11 and after that calamity, my husband didn’t want to fly anywhere for several years.  We limited our treks to a four-hour journey from our home.  We had wonderful times in Boston (a great town for kids), down the Jersey shore, and two years in a row we went to Ocean City, Maryland (another great place for children).  The last trip to Ocean City was miraculous for our family because it was in The Jolly Rodger Waterpark, surrounded by hundreds of gallons of rushing water, that we received the phone call from our adoption agency that we’d been matched with our daughter who was thousands of miles away, across the water, in China.  [Read more...]