Have you created your summer bucket list yet?  I hope so!  It started yesterday!  If you want to know more about it, you should check out The Happy Family Movement.  They are our amazingly awesome/incredibly inspiring friends.  Not only should you sign up for the summer bucket list challenge, you should also follow them.  Seriously, you will love them as much as we do!

Why are we doing the bucket list challenge?  Well, for the obvious reasons and because family time in the summer is most challenging for us.  We are wedding photographers, and most of our weekends are booked up throughout the summer.  It’s also a crazy busy time for us. It’s really easy at that point to be so busy with work that August seems to roll around so quickly and the girls are back in school. We then realize, we haven’t had much of a summer with them. Then I wish for a redo.  And that my friends, is the worst feeling.  The older I get, the more I realize that life is about balance.  We work a lot and there are days where we will work long days, but we do that so we can take off whenever we want and spend that time with our family.  I refuse to be one of those people that regrets not being able to really enjoy them growing up.

So our bucket list is filled with some more adventurous things, but also really simple little things too.   Like making shapes with clouds and catching fireflies.  It may seem small and maybe a little silly, but these are things the girls love.  Of course our girls love the zoo and the beach, but they also love to lay on the ground at night and count stars, just as much.  What matters to them most is that they are having fun with mommy and daddy.

That’s what this challenge means to us.  To appreciate the little things, stop randomly working mid week and go out and knock off something on our bucket list.  Something they will enjoy doing as well as us!  I also look at this challenge as simply a reminder.  A reminder that we have two six year olds that are getting older each year (apparently I cannot do anything about that).  It’s also a reminder that we have only one chance to raise our girls, there are no re-dos and how we raise them will shape who they are as grown ups.  By enjoying the little things as an adult that we all loved as a child, we hope that our girls will be like this with their kids.

Below is our bucket list!  We’d love to hear yours!

The last two we plan to do quite frequently!  The girls help create this list, and two of the things they love most in the summer is playing freeze tag (they cheat) and swimming.  They wanted to add those in the list, but I stuck them at the end because we are going to do those a lot.  We may be adults, but who doesn’t love freeze tag and swimming?!?!