Whatever Is Excellent with Leanne Tuggle
Encouragement and Inspiration for women choosing to rise above the “just survive” mentality and instead set their mind on thriving in all that they say and do. The ultimate goal is to equip you to pursue whatever is excellent in the midst of your ordinary life and in all that you say and do.
Whatever Is Excellent with Leanne Tuggle
35: Summer Sanity - A Framework for Peace, Not Pressure
Do you dread the long, unstructured days of summer with kids at home? You're not alone. That well-meaning quote about "only having 18 summers with your kids" often creates more anxiety than inspiration for parents already feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of filling endless summer days.
Seven years ago, I felt exactly this way—anxious about managing preschoolers and twins without the support system school provided. Today, I genuinely look forward to summer break. What changed? I discovered that creating a simple, flexible framework transforms summer from chaotic to peaceful. Children naturally thrive with predictable rhythms, and structure doesn't mean strictness—it means security.
This episode shares four practical approaches to establishing a life-giving summer schedule: creating a loose weekly framework with morning routines and afternoon activities; theming your days (Make-it Monday, Take-a-trip Tuesday); implementing a daily "room time reset" for everyone to recharge independently; and remembering to extend grace when plans inevitably change. You'll learn why incorporating both work and rest mirrors God's design and how summer offers unique opportunities for discipleship when we're intentional with our time.
Remember, you're not a cruise director responsible for orchestrating every moment of summer fun. Your mission is to cultivate peace and provide purpose for your days together. As Isaiah 26:3 reminds us, "You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you." What atmosphere do you want to cultivate in your home this summer, and how might a simple rhythm help make space for that?
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Have you ever heard the phrase, or maybe it's a quote that says something to the effect of you only have 18 summers with your kids, so make them count. I'll be honest with you, when I very first saw or read that quote, I didn't find it super helpful. It kind of freaked me out a little bit. If I'm honest with you, it felt like a lot of pressure and I was already feeling overwhelmed and anxious, particularly about the prospect of a summer, an entire summer, at home with my preschooler and my baby twins. How was I going to manage the long days at home without the support system that preschool provided, and reading that you only have 18 summers? I understand the intentionality it is trying to convey. It wasn't super helpful. And then I felt guilty for feeling some way about that. Surely other moms weren't terrified of summer break. So what was wrong with me? I love my children. Why did I feel so worried about spending all summer with them at home? About spending all summer with them at home? It was from those anxious worries and thoughts that I started contemplating a better way to handle summer break for then and into the future. I didn't want to dread summers and I knew that God is a God of peace and not chaos. So creating a system for my sanity became necessary, and now, seven years later, summer break has officially begun in our home, and I am genuinely excited. In fact, I think I've been looking forward to summer break since, probably like March. So what changed? How did setting up a system for summer bring freedom and sanity? First, and most importantly, if you have felt any of those feelings that I just described, I want to encourage you with this, those feelings that I just described. I want to encourage you with this A simple, flexible, life-giving summer is possible. Establishing some structure into your days brings peace and it mirrors God's design. Grace and consistency are a huge part of setting up a summertime schedule that works for you and your children. Creating a system for your summer is not about perfection or rigid rules. It is about intentionally stewarding your time well, without the pressure of there only being 18 summers.
Leanne:When I was a kid, and even during my years as a teacher, I loved summer break All the freedom to do whatever I wanted, stay up late, no homework. It was all so incredible. It felt so good, especially that Monday right after or right at the start of your summer break, but then about a week into summer I started to miss the routine and the structure of the school day by the time school started up again in the fall. I couldn't wait to jump back into the rhythm and the routines of school and over the years I've noticed the same patterns in my children. Kids thrive with predictable rhythms. For a child, structure doesn't mean strictness, it means security.
Leanne:One of my favorite verses I know I've shared this verse so many times, but I really love it is 1 Corinthians 1440. It says but everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way. My type A personality loves that. That is in the Bible. God gave us the ultimate example when he created the world in six days and then he rested on the seventh day. He designed rhythms and, as we have talked about in past episodes, creating rhythms of both work and rest are good, even for your children, even during summer break.
Leanne:Summer is an incredible time to focus on discipleship with your children, no matter their age, including fun, learning opportunities and mixing in some free time with responsibilities. Deuteronomy 6, 6 through 7 says these commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up. You get to include your children into your daily tasks and activities during the summer months and while doing this, you get to disciple them and talk with them about what God is teaching you and showing you. Just like in that verse, you get to disciple them and show them how God is teaching you different things throughout your daily activities. They get to participate with you in a more interactive way. This is where that intentionality with your time comes in, and the best way to ensure that you are being a good steward of the time that you are given with your children every summer is to create a summer schedule or perhaps some sort of a framework that you can follow, even if it's just as a backup plan.
Leanne:So today I want to give you four practical tips to help you set up a summer schedule in your home. I don't want to just give you a summer schedule, but I want to give you some ideas to consider so that you can feel empowered to make up a schedule that will make sense for you and for your family. So the first thing is to set up a weekly framework to loosely follow and please hear that this isn't rigid, loosely follow. Something like mornings that include chores or devotions or reading together In our home. I really like to include some simple lessons or even some workbook pages to keep things that they have learned in school fresh and top of mind. I really love those summer brain quest books that are for in between the grades. These are really helpful for helping the kids kind of keep things that they've learned all throughout the year in their mind. And then we loved love to read aloud together, and the morning time is great, and devotions while they're eating their breakfast is the perfect time to be able to do that before you go about all of the fun activities of your day.
Leanne:Afternoons could include things like creative time, maybe outside playtime, perhaps there's even a quiet time, and I'll talk a little bit more about that too. Evenings are for family connections around the dinner table, maybe board games or even walks around the neighborhood. I can imagine that taking a walk around the neighborhood would be especially helpful for teens, just saying hey, let's go for a walk and no, no cell phones, no screens, just companionable walking together. And I feel like during that time is when maybe they'll open up a little bit more and share about what's going on in their lives, and I just love that opportunity. This framework that I'm talking about here is flexible and it's full of plenty of free play and unstructured activities too. The intention of the framework is just to provide some predictability and consistency within the day, something that your children can look forward to or expect that will likely happen.
Leanne:A second thing that you can do for setting up a system or a schedule in the summer is to theme the days of the week, and these that I'm going to share with you are just suggestions. They're kind of fun play on words, but these are some ideas of how you can theme your days, and this is something that I love to do. I do it with meal planning. I theme days of the week all the time because it just simplifies things. So here's some examples. You could have make it Monday Perhaps this is for crafting or baking. My daughter actually likes to call it mail it Monday, and she likes writing letters to her friends. So we have lived in so many different places all over the world and often throughout the school year she's so busy with after-school activities and homework and things. So summer is a really fun time to be able to keep in touch with all of those friends, and so we have a big box of all kinds of different cards and paper and stickers and she digs in there and writes letters to her friends every Monday.
Leanne:Throughout the summer, you could have take a trip Tuesday. This could include maybe going to the park or the library, the pool or maybe some other fun adventure for your family. So something to keep in mind with take a trip Tuesday. I like to count out how many weeks of summer break we have. So, for example, we have nine weeks for us, and when I look at that then I mark out the days that we have family trips already. Like we have a camping trip planned, the kids have a week of camp, so I only have seven weeks left. When I look at that, and if I could think of seven fun little trips, like little day trips, that we could do, it's actually really not that many. If we include like park or the pool, there's really not that many that I need to come up with. So having like a little uh, a place in my planner where I keep all these different ideas is really handy, and so then, when Tuesday comes along, you can pick one and go do that fun adventure.
Leanne:Then you could have work at Wednesday. So this is a fun time for like chores or maybe little projects that you want to work on throughout your home. This is a great opportunity to build that in and let your kids see the benefit of work. Um, I also like the idea of including like a life skills lesson. I have a friend of mine who's planning to do life skills camp with her kids and I've seen other families do that too, but this would be a perfect opportunity to build that into your summer. You could teach them how to wash and fold and put away laundry or maybe safely change a light bulb a light bulb. Or let's say you have older kids and maybe they're working on the car, learning how to change a flat tire. There's so many options for building work into your summer in a really positive and fun way.
Leanne:Then there's think it Thursday. This is for learning or problem-solving activities. Maybe this is the day where we do a little bit more schoolwork just to kind of keep up with it throughout the summer. This could even be a Bible memory verse practice day Anything that involves problem-solving or thinking through critical thinking skills. That could be for Thursdays. Or thinking through critical thinking skills, that could be for Thursdays. And then fun Friday maybe this is a movie day, or play dates, ice cream outings, anything that it would just be really fun for your kids and maybe include your community or other friends, something that we're planning on doing. We love to do weekly forest play dates throughout the school year, but we're going to switch it to Friday for the summer so that we can have forest Fridays, because that just sounds like a lot of fun.
Leanne:The third thing for setting up a summer schedule is to include a quiet time, and I have talked about this quiet time, or we like to call it a room time reset. I've talked about it before, but I think it is worth repeating. So if you have older children who no longer take a nap, or maybe you have littles that need to nap and older kids who are past that stage, this quiet time is still really valuable. As I mentioned earlier, we do call it room time reset for one hour, usually right after lunch. That's when I have found it to work the best for us. Everyone goes into their room or a quiet place in the house and they either read, maybe listen to an audio book, take a nap Sometimes they still do that color, anything. That's like a quiet, calm activity. I personally use this time for reading or writing or maybe checking in on work related things. But the reset is valuable for everyone because we need a break from each other. We spend a lot of time together in the summer after not spending as much time during the school year, and so sometimes we just need a little bit of a break, and I have noticed that squabbles and sometimes the problematic behaviors that can pop up in the summer they they generally disappear for a bit after this reset in the middle of the day. So if you don't already have a rhythm of a quiet time built in, I highly recommend it for your summertime schedule.
Leanne:The fourth thing that you can do when you're setting up a summertime schedule is to remember to be flexible with lots of grace. Even the best summer system will have interruptions. Unexpected things will come up and instead of feeling frustrated, remember that these interruptions are opportunities to show patience and to model grace. The best part of summer is that it is flexible and fluid. You are free to switch things up at any time to better accommodate the needs of your family. If any of these suggestions are just not working. You don't have to keep doing them all summer long, even with all the great ideas and this schedules and the systems. Remember that you are not a cruise director. You're not a camp counselor. You are not responsible for controlling every moment. You do not need a plan for every minute of the day. Your mission is to cultivate peace and to provide purpose for your days and your time spent together.
Leanne:An encouraging verse, I think, for all of us, is found in Galatians 6, 9, and it says Let us not become weary in doing good for the proper time. We will reap a harvest If we do not give up. It is worth the effort to be intentional with the time that you get to spend with your children every summer, not out of fear because you only get 18 summers, but because you see the value in embracing these built in seasons of disciples. And you don't have to do it alone. Invite the Holy Spirit into your summer schedule. He is your helper.
Leanne:To close this episode, I want to leave you with a verse that you can meditate on this week. This verse is a reminder that peace isn't found in perfect schedules, but in a mind and a heart that is fixed on the Lord, even in the joyful season of summer. Isaiah 26, 3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Something to ponder this week. What kind of atmosphere do I want to cultivate in my home this summer, and how can a simple rhythm help make space for that?