I wrote the following blog last year at the beginning of school. I recently located it and have added it to the Surviving Boys blog.

We are a family of four boys and a male dog named “Einstein.” My wife tells everyone that she lives in a fraternity. It must seem that way with so much “male-ness” around her. We had our fourth boy in April, so this summer our adventures were limited to places we could drive to by car. I was not looking forward to flying with 4 car seats in tow (our boys are 8, 6, 4 years and the baby is 6 months old). We live in Northern California and spent some time in Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Oxnard exploring the beautiful Pacific coast. Having been raised in California, we are a family that enjoys our days spent building sandcastles and digging for sand-crabs at the beach. Summer seemed to have been especially short this year, because our school district decided to move the start date up a whole week into August. All of the boys, including myself, had a very difficult time getting up and ready for school after a summer of sleeping in. That first week was nearly impossible, but we finally made it to Friday. I was walking my boys to school when my oldest son said “it’s too bad that summer had to end.” I understood what he meant and replied, “well at least it’s Friday!” His next reply was one of those special insights that we parents get from talking to our children. My oldest son turned to me and said, “you know something dad, weekends are like two days of summer.”