Summer Is Here. You Don’t Have to Have a Plan. | Martina Newport Photography

School’s out. Maybe that hit you like a wave of relief — no more lunches to pack, no more scrambling for shoes at 7:45am, no more permission slips materializing out of nowhere the night before they’re due. Maybe it hit you like a low-level panic — eleven weeks stretching ahead of you, a child who will announce they’re bored by 9am on day four, and approximately zero buffer in your day.

Probably both. Simultaneously. Summer with kids is one of those seasons that exists in the gap between how it looks in your imagination and how it actually unfolds in your kitchen. The imagination version has popsicles and sprinklers and lazy mornings that drift into easy afternoons. The kitchen version has someone fighting with their sibling over the iPad at 8:30am while you haven’t had your coffee yet.

Both versions are real. Both versions are yours. Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I keep having to re-learn: summer doesn’t need to be optimized. It needs to be survived with your sanity intact and your relationship with your kids intact — and ideally, occasionally, it needs to be genuinely lovely. Not every day. Just enough.

And if somewhere in the middle of all of that you find yourself wishing someone would quietly document the season you’re in—without pressure, without perfection—that’s exactly what I offer in my family photography sessions in Bloomington-Normal.

— — —

Let go of the itinerary. There’s a particular pressure that arrives with summer — the sense that you should be filling it. Camp and swim lessons and enrichment programs and family trips and intentional memory-making. And some of that is wonderful, truly. But the pressure to orchestrate every week of it is exhausting, and it quietly communicates something to your kids that I don’t think you mean to communicate: that unstructured time isn’t valuable. That boredom is a problem to be solved.

It isn’t. Boredom is actually where a lot of the good stuff lives. When kids are bored — genuinely, uncomfortably bored — they eventually invent something. A game, a project, a story, a world. They come to you and you redirect them and they come back again and eventually, if you hold the line gently, they figure it out. That figuring-it-out is a gift, even when it doesn’t feel like one in the moment.

You don’t have to fill every hour. A loose rhythm — something in the morning, something after lunch, free time in between — is more than enough scaffolding for most kids.

Give the summer a few anchors, not a schedule. Think of it less like a calendar and more like a handful of things you want to make sure happen before September. Maybe it’s one weekend trip. Maybe it’s a weekly library visit. Maybe it’s a standing Friday night movie on the back porch with popcorn and blankets. Maybe it’s teaching your kid to make one meal from start to finish.

Anchors give the summer shape without turning you into a cruise director. They’re the things your kids will remember — not because you planned every detail, but because you showed up for them consistently.

Let the ordinary days be ordinary. Not every summer day is a memory-making day. Some days are just Tuesday — someone’s cranky, it’s too hot, everyone’s a little sick of each other. Those days count too. They’re part of the rhythm of real family life, and they don’t need to be rescued or redeemed.

In fact, some of the sweetest summer moments I’ve ever heard families describe weren’t planned at all. The afternoon the sprinkler came out and nobody went inside for three hours. The night everyone piled on the couch and watched an old movie they’d never seen. The lazy morning when your child crawled into bed with you and you both fell back asleep for another hour.

You can’t plan those. You can only leave enough space for them to happen!

Be easy on yourself about screens. I’ll say it plainly: screens in summer are fine. The guilt spiral about screen time is often harder on you — and by extension your kids — than the screens themselves. A long afternoon of a favorite show while you get something done, or everyone plays a game together, or they just need to decompress — that’s not failure. That’s summer… The question worth asking isn’t “how much screen time?” but “are we also doing other things? Are we also going outside sometimes? Are we also talking to each other?” If the answer is mostly yes, you’re doing fine.

Notice the small things. This is the one I want to leave you with, because it’s connected to something I think about a lot.

Summer has a particular quality of light and slowness that the rest of the year doesn’t. The days are long. Bedtime bends a little. Kids are more themselves — less scheduled, less performing, more just there with you. Notice it. Not with a camera necessarily, not with a plan. Just with your actual eyes, your actual attention.

The way your child looks running through a sprinkler. The particular sound of a summer evening in your neighborhood. The way they smell like sunscreen and sweat and outside. The conversations that happen in the car or on a walk when nobody’s rushing anywhere.

These ordinary summer days are the texture of your family’s story. They don’t have to be extraordinary to be worth being present for.

You don’t need a perfect summer. You just need yours.

---

As a family photographer in Bloomington-Normal, I see this every summer—the pressure moms feel to turn every day into something memorable, structured, and meaningful. But the families I work with most often aren’t living in the big planned moments. They’re living in the in-between ones: slow mornings, spontaneous backyard play, and evenings where nothing really went according to plan, and somehow that became the best part of the day.

If you’re looking for simple, real-life ideas for this season, I put together a local summer list for moms that might help take some of that pressure off.