No more pencils, no more books.

No more teacher’s dirty looks.

But if you ask my children, they will say they are prone to getting dirty looks from their mom. After all, our word for the summer is structure, need I say more?

Wait. what? A word for the summer that has absolutely nothing to do with fun or sleeping late or recording Snapchat videos in the middle of the night? 

Exactly. And for the last three weeks, we’ve been discussing that structure, enjoying the beauty of down time, setting individual goals, determining a plan of action to achieve those goals, holding each other accountable, clearing the clutter from the 2015-2016 school year from our house, and preparing for our glow up.

Glow up. A term defined by the Urban Dictionary as the process of improving oneself to the point of disbelief. It is the incredible transformation that teens plan for and apparently culminates in senior year. It is the process by which you move from awkward just-out-of-middle-school teenager to supercool-high-school teenager.

Everyone in my house is about glowing up this summer. Including me. Of course, I love the idea of self-improvement and goal completion so when I learned the term, I embraced it. Much to their dismay.  (Apparently I overuse the term, so let’s just call this list our family’s summer manifesto and leave it at that. But between us, we’re glowing up okay?)

Our Summer Manifesto

We will exercise are brains and our bodies. We’re reading, we’re walking, we’re training for soccer season. Here are a few of the books we’re reading (ads):

• Binge by Tyler Oakley
• Selp Helf by Miranda Sings
• I Hate My Selfie by Shane Dawson
• In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World by Joey Graceffa
• Enchanted Islands by Allison Amend
• On Elizabeth Street by Catherine Adami

For more book suggestions, click here.

We honor sleep and strive to achieve a healthy night’s rest each and every night. There is still some dissension on the definition of “healthy night’s rest” but we’re working on it.

Two hours a day, every day, we will disconnect from electronic devices. It’s actually not as bad as it seems, even I have come to welcome those two hours and disconnect more time on the weekends.

We will take pride in our home environment by keeping it clean and tidying up daily. With all of us home during the day, a little bit of clutter can turn into the worst messes ever. We don’t have time for that!

We will stay hydrated and drink plenty of water. It’s hot in Texas. Everyone has to drink at least 100 ounces of water a day.

We will eat at least 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. This causes us to be creative in the kitchen. We’re searching websites, making smoothies, and embracing our nutrition. Do you have any suggestions?

We will laugh as much as possible. Totally doable.

We will plan for our future academic endeavors. Based on my experience working in college environment, I’m teaching them about dual credit, AP courses, and doing some preliminary college prep with them. One of the teens has decided to become fluent in Spanish and the other attends a STEM camp at a local university. Let’s do it!

We will serve our community. Just because it’s hot, that doesn’t mean we can’t serve others.

We will learn some valuable life skills. Two of the teens are taking Driver’s Ed. I’m not ready.

We will evaluate the quality of the relationships in our lives and remove negative and toxic people. The teen drama continues over the summer.

We will find every television remote we’ve ever lost in our living room. This is clearly about determining the difference between reach goals and realistic ones.

We will get in touch with our inner stylists. Tyra has makeover plans for Jada and me. We are kind of indifferent now, but willing to try it.

And maybe, just maybe, there could be some late night snapchats, breakfast visits to IHOP, vacations visiting friends and family, and even sleeping late. After all, any minute that you get to sleep past 6:00 am (our normal wake up time) is sleeping late, right?

Stumble It!