I know, I know. Summer doesn’t officially end until September 22nd this year, which means there’s 52 days left of the season. But holy shit, where did the season go?

One minute, it was the end of school for my kids (May 31st). The next minute, it’s August 1st and they have just 20 days until school starts back up. As a parent, I welcome the school year and I know my wife will agree on that. At the same time though, I’m still scratching my head as to how fast this month got here.

Normally, summer means it’s time to go out and have adventures: we have Cedar Point close by, the Toledo Zoo, Lake Erie not too far from us, and the Mud Hens, among other tourist spots and activities we have here in Ohio.

Unfortunately, we didn’t do much of anything like we planned this summer. We have a season pass to both Cedar Point and the Toledo Zoo but yet haven’t utilized them like we wanted. The zoo is a bit easier to plan for considering the kids love animals and there isn’t really a time frame we need to follow. For Cedar Point, that’s a different story as we have our youngest that’s autistic and it’s really difficult to accommodate for him (meltdowns be damned).

Of course, we had our county fair 2 weeks ago and went to that since our oldest 2 were in 4H and they were involved with that. But the fair is the laughingstock of the state; you can walk through it and see everything within an hour, 2 at most if you want food. It’s pretty small and I swear it gets worse every year. If it wasn’t for the kids being involved, we’d never go.

At the same time, the fair was 2 weeks ago. That’s usually the indicator that summer is quickly coming to an end, and pretty soon Labor Day will be upon us and then all of the fall activities (which I love). It’s all downhill after that until the holidays (cue the skull and crossbones emoji, as that’s my least favorite time of year).

But, I digress. I need to find a way to make this last month count before we start getting busy again with school schedules.